In a new article published this month in Plant Biology, Bartłomiej Surmacz described spatial patterns in differently colored morphs of the field bindweed.
Graphical abstract, doi:10.1111/plb.13537.
In this work, Bartek used publicly available data shared through the iNaturalist platform. There, people from all over posted their photographs of bindweed flowers that occurred in differently colored morphs (white or pink). Because of the large number of observations, Bartek trained an algorithm to classify the photos by morph. He then analyzed the patterns of morph occurrence in nature.
Check out the full paper here. What a great example of how one can combine citizen science and machine learning to conduct a novel large-scale study!
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