Are alpine flowers visited more during the day, or during the night? Does the importance of nocturnal pollinators differ with elevation? How do alpine pollinators respond to warming treatments? And is it possible that some pollinators “bully” others away from flowers while foraging?
These are all questions that insect surveillance cameras help to address. We have recorded millions of images of flowers introduced to mountain sites in Switzerland, Norway and South Africa. They are a gold mine of information about plant-pollinator and pollinator-pollinator interactions. Projects will involve searching for and identifying pollinators in images, answering questions about the impacts of climate change on pollination and species interactions. In the process, contributors will help to build a collaborative dataset for automated pollinator detection and are likely to be considered authors on a resulting publication.
Why contribute?
Beyond potential co-authorship on a publication, contributors get to work with a team of international researchers in the RangeX project, an international project about the impacts of range-expanding plants in mountains. They will receive training in image labeling and basic insect identification. We can offer supervision to committed contributors and create a project with independent analysis. We could even offer some insights into statistics with R.
Potential project ideas include:
- Seasonal or day/night visitation patterns of pollinator communities
- Responses of insect pollinators to warming treatments
- Characteristics of pollinator communities at high and low elevations
- Interactions between insect pollinator guilds
Tiers of contribution
We invite contributions in two tiers, depending on if you want to co-design a research project.
Super-contributor: Label at least 5000 flower hours (100 hours of work, following ~25 flowers through their lives). Adopt a research project, with supervision, tackling specific questions.
Contributor: Label at least 500 flower hours (10 hours of work) from a cross-section of flowers and regions to co-create the dataset. You may still be invited to co-author a publication.
Contact Jamie Alison (jalison@ecos.au.dk) and Nadine Arzt (nadine.arzt@uib.no) for further details!