Taxonomy-the field charged with naming and classifying organisms-forms a foundation for biological research. An understanding of the species on Earth is needed for informing biodiversity research, conservation efforts, management strategies, and global policy. In recent decades, a "taxonomic impediment" has arisen: there is an urgent need to know the millions of yet-undiscovered species, while funding for the science charged with this task, taxonomy, and the number of trained taxonomists are declining. This work aims to provide three software tools for taxonomists that allow them to work more efficiently and effectively, reducing this impediment. First, a system for automatically landmarking images of specimens for geometric morphometric studies was introduced, which could greatly reduce the time required to manually landmark images for these studies while also increasing the possible sample size of such studies. The system's landmarking error, however, was extremely variable on test images of the wings of dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata), and was ultimately too large (300-500 px) to compete with manual landmarking at this time. Second, a method was presented for automatically standardizing and extracting descriptive features from images of insect wings in order to quantify the appearance of the wings. The standardization method was successful in converting scans of odonate wings into consistently-formatted square images, automatically. Then, features describing the color, texture, and shape of the wings were able to be extracted, producing a small set of 663 coefficients that were able to distinguish between species. Finally, a system called Odomatic was presented and tested for automatically identifying Odonata to species from images of their wings, using the feature extraction method combined with machine learning techniques. Odomatic was able to make classifications between 32 species with expert-level (up to 92%) accuracy, making it useful for quickly identifying specimens. The tools presented here will be deployed for use by odonate researchers through the website OdonataCentral.org, but will also be released as open-sourced Python scripts so that they can be customized to be implemented on other taxonomic groups. This work will enable taxonomists and other interested parties to make easier morphological comparisons and faster identifications.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
Biology
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Odonata
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
Identifier
ETD_7461
PhysicalDescription
Form (authority = gmd)
electronic resource
InternetMediaType
application/pdf
InternetMediaType
text/xml
Extent
1 online resource (xi, 177 p. : ill.)
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
Note (type = statement of responsibility)
by William Robert Kuhn
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Graduate School - Newark Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = local)
rucore10002600001
Location
PhysicalLocation (authority = marcorg); (displayLabel = Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
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