Applying computer vision to digitised natural history collections for climate change research: temperature-size responses in British butterflies

Natural history collections (NHCs) are invaluable resources for understanding biotic response to global change. Museums around the world are currently imaging specimens, capturing specimen data, and making them freely available online. In parallel to the digitisation effort, there have been great advancements in computer vision (CV): the computer trained automated recognition/detection, and measurement of features in digital images. Applying CV to digitised NHCs has the potential to greatly accelerate the use of NHCs for biotic response to global change research. In this paper, we apply CV to a very large, digitised collection to test hypotheses in an established area of biotic response to climate change research: temperature-size responses. We develop a CV pipeline (Mothra) and apply it to the NHM iCollections of British butterflies (>180,000 specimens). Mothra automatically detects the specimen in the image, sets the scale, measures wing features (e.g., forewing length), determines the orientation of the specimen (pinned ventrally or dorsally), and identifies the sex. We pair these measurements and meta-data with temperature records to test how adult size varies with temperature during the immature stages of species and to assess patterns of sexual-size dimorphism across species and families. Mothra accurately measures the forewing lengths of butterfly specimens and compared to manual baseline measurements, Mothra accurately determines sex and forewing lengths of butterfly specimens. Females are the larger sex in most species and an increase in adult body size with warm monthly temperatures during the late larval stages is the most common temperature size response. These results confirm suspected patterns and support hypotheses based on recent studies using a smaller dataset of manually measured specimens. We show that CV can be a powerful tool to efficiently and accurately extract phenotypic data from a very large collection of digital NHCs. In the future, CV will become widely applied to digital NHC collections to advance ecological and evolutionary research and to accelerate the use of NHCs for biotic response to global change research.

Reimagining the U.S. Global Change Research Program to Support Equitable Community Engagement Using a Disability Lens

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP or “the Program”) is at a pivotal moment in its evolution as it works to develop its next decadal strategy. Constrained by an outdated mandate and facing an increasing demand for actional and usable climate information, the Program has an opportunity to re-envision its already robust participatory mechanisms to improve engagement with historically marginalized communities. The disability community is acutely sensitive to Earth’s changing climate, facing threats from extreme weather, in addition to enhanced risks due to systematic ableism in our policy and planning spaces. However, the disability community can also be a critical source of innovative ideas and inclusive practices that can ensure the climate documents guiding future policy development are just and equitable. By adopting a disability lens in its strategy update plans, the Program can ensure that the climate information it provides to local and regional decision-makers through the National Climate Assessment process supports future U.S. climate policy with the tenets of justice and equity at the core. In particular, the Program should revise its community engagement framework guided by 1) the social model of disability, 2) narratives from within the disability community, and 3) ideas of universal design.

Reflecting on the Anthropocene: The Call for Deeper Transformations

Research on global environmental change has transformed the way that we think about human-environment relationships and Earth system processes. The four Ambio articles highlighted in this 50th Anniversary Issue have influenced the cultural narrative on environmental change, highlighting concepts such as “resilience,” “coupled human and natural systems”, and the “Anthropocene.” In this peer response, I argue that global change research is still paying insufficient attention to how to deliberately transform systems and cultures to avoid the risks that science itself has warned us about. In particular, global change research has failed to adequately integrate the subjective realm of meaning making into both understanding and action. Although this has been an implicit subtext in global change research, it is time to fully integrate research from the social sciences and environmental humanities.

The integration of element cycles: contrasting perspectives from natural and managed systems in global change research

<p>Despite the ecological connection between natural and managed systems, they are often studied separately, by different research groups. This echoes the focus of this session that, despite the tight coupling of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N), global change investigations of these element cycles may be carried out by different research groups. This talk will address the contrasting approach to integrating element cycles between researchers in natural and managed systems.</p><p>Global change research in natural systems has focused on predicting the C balance of the system. Integrating research between C and other element cycles makes sense in this situation, because the growth and activity of the research organisms (animals, plants, microorganisms) are limited by other elements. This stoichiometric theory (multiple limitation hypothesis) has been investigated for at least three decades, and although C and other elements are often studied independently, many researchers in natural systems have embraced this elemental integration in their global change research. </p><p>Managed systems also have a long history of element limitation research, primarily NPK, with a focus on maximising plant growth and the economy of fertiliser use efficiency. However, natural climate solutions - necessary because mandatory reductions in fossil fuel emissions are insufficient to meet climate targets – often rely on sequestering C in biomass and soils, changing the focus of managed system research to include C. As we know from our research in natural systems, the process of C sequestration is tightly coupled to N (and other elements). Unfortunately, most soil C process models or earth system models do not include N (or other elements). Very few soil C sequestration predictions include the C-cost of N<sub>2</sub>O losses - an important trade-off in N-saturated systems - primarily because there has been insufficient research into the microbial interdependency of C and N in managed soils.</p><p>In this talk I will discuss recent insights into how the integration of C and N (and other elements) in the ecological research of managed systems can improve our ability to mitigate the consequences of global change.</p>

Changes in plant collection practices from the 16 th to 21 st centuries: implications for the use of herbarium specimens in global change research

Background and aims Herbaria were recently advertised as reliable sources of information regarding historical changes in plant traits and biotic interactions. To justify the use of herbaria in global change research, we asked whether the characteristics of herbarium specimens have changed during the past centuries and whether these changes were due to shifts in plant collection practices. Methods We measured nine characteristics from 515 herbarium specimens of common European trees and large shrubs collected from 1558‒2016. We asked botanists to rank these specimens by their scientific quality, and asked artists to rank these specimens by their beauty. Key results Eight of eleven assessed characteristics of herbarium specimens changed significantly during the study period. The average number of leaves in plant specimens increased threefold, whereas the quality of specimen preparation decreased. Leaf size negatively correlated with leaf number in specimen in both among-species and within-species analyses. The proportion of herbarium sheets containing plant reproductive structures peaked in the 1850s. The scientific value of herbarium specimens increased until the 1700s, but then did not change, whereas their aesthetic value showed no systematic trends. Conclusions Our findings strongly support the hypothesis that many characteristics of herbarium specimens have changed systematically and substantially from the 16 th to 21 st centuries due to changes in plant collection and preservation practices. These changes may both create patterns which could be erroneously attributed to environmental changes and obscure historical trends in plant traits. The utmost care ought to be taken to guard against the possibility of misinterpretation of data obtained from herbarium specimens. We recommend that directional changes in characters of herbarium specimens which occurred during the past 150‒200 years, primarily in specimen’s size and in the presence of reproductive structures, are accounted for when searching for the effects of past environmental changes on plant traits.