Distributed computer projects are taking off in a big way. “Many are run on a volunteer basis, and involve users donating their unused computational power to work on interesting computational problems.” That usually means looking for extraterrestrial life or working out the structure of black holes or proteins while your computer idles away. Herbaria@home is a bit different. When you sign up as a volunteer, you receive scans of herbarium sheets, you digitize the label information, and these data are then added to the herbarium’s information system. Actually, there are other examples of such projects, which use the public’s spare brain-power, as well as their spare computer-power. I wonder if this approach could be used to improve genebank documentation. Perhaps to geo-reference tricky accessions? Or how about to characterize the morphology of different varieties from photos?
Very interesting effort!… 35,157 specimens from 3,122 taxa (including hybrids) from 732 genera. Everything between 2006 and 2009 (that gives you a rate of 33 specimens/day).
I wonder what would result from a global effort like that (for both germplasm and herbaria, and not only for passport data).
Just a matter of time to have something like it for geo-referencing. In fact, we are now using crowd-sourcing indirectly, as we use Wikipedia and similar.
I would guess that within a few years computers can do the work with pictures.
Neural network approaches to analyze morphological traits, perhaps? a characterization dataset per plant species plus its pictures (and a selection to train and test) to develop the model, and then you send your one and the system returns both the name of the species and the characterization data?
Is anyone working in something like that out there?