Comments on photos entered in citizen science platforms like iNaturalist or eBird can carry useful information about wildlife interactions that aren’t necessarily recorded in the metadata.
Now, researchers are using artificial intelligence to quickly sort through photos, finding those online conservations likely to contain information useful to ecologists.
“In many cases, species interactions require direct observation, and that’s really hard to come by simply because you can’t keep a lot of people in the field monitoring the same patch of an ecosystem for 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Hengxing Zou, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan during this research, in a press release.
In a study, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team mined iNaturalist comments for data about the interactions between West Coast lady (Vanessa annabella) butterflies and plants in California and Mexico. They also examined comments in eBird to learn more about interactions between birds in Michigan. The team used Claude and ChatGPT to successfully extract comments and useful information on both topics.
“There’s definitely a lot more information that could be recovered from these kinds of comments, in addition to species interactions,” Zou said.
