About the Project | TOWD Project
Description: Entomology, evolutionary biology, biodiversity informatics
I’m an entomologist and evolutionary biologist with diverse interests ranging from biodiversity informatics to automatic species recognition. Though I have a biological background, I also have strong interests in computer vision and machine learning, and love to imagine and implement new ways to automate processes for gathering useful biological data. As of September 2018, I am the Director of Science and Research at Discover Life in America ( DLiA ), where I help direct biodiversity research conducted in G
DLiA is a non-profit charged with carrying out an ATBI (all taxa biodiversity inventory) in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP). Currently, there are some 20,000 species known to the Park; with around half of those discovered by the efforts of this ATBI and 1000 of those that are newly described species! However, there are estimated to be 3-4 times this many species in the Park, so we have a long way to go. I am helping to guide the activities of the ATBI, including biodiversity research and citizen
The TOWD Project is a collaborative effort with Rutgers and University of Alabama, and several other institutions to digitize the wings of all North American species of dragonflies and damselflies, and to build a publicly-available image library, hosted by CyVerse Cyberinfrastructure. We’re incorporating wing-based species identification engine, which will be trained to distinguish all North American Odonata, and creating tools to be able to automatically extract phenological information from these images (
About the Project | TOWD Project