‘Better tools … are really important’

A new app that uses AI to identify bees is set to help researchers across the U.S. to track bee populations, the first step in helping species under threat, KCUR Kansas City News reports.

Until now, researchers interested in bee populations have had a difficult time differentiating among the estimated 4,000 North American bee species.

“It’s a huge problem,” said Kansas State University entomologist Brian Spiesman, who created the app, per KCUR. “We bring back a few hundred specimens [from fieldwork] and we spend much longer identifying them in the lab than we do actually collecting them.”

In fact, some of the trickiest specimens may not be identifiable to most researchers. The smallest ones are gnat-sized, with subtle differences between species, KCUR revealed. So instead, they’re mailed to specialists who sort out the fine differences. 

This takes up researchers’ time and slows down their projects, not to mention that there are never enough of those top experts.

That’s why Spiesman decided to train an AI to do the work.

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BeeMachine is a smartphone app available not only to researchers, but to members of the general public. Snap a photo of a bee, and the computer will identify the species or at least the genus. So far, it’s been trained on 350 bee varieties, with more to come. Spiesman hopes to train the AI on all 20,000 species of bee worldwide and to get international users involved.

Tracking where bees appear is essential to identifying and protecting potentially endangered species.

For example, right now, the Southern Plains bumblebee and the American bumblebee are both under review by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and could be listed as threatened or endangered, which would come with legal protections. There are thousands of other species facing the same threat of habitat destruction, rising temperatures, and insecticide use that might benefit from endangered species status.

It’s worth going out of our way to help bees because they’re prolific pollinators, carrying pollen from one plant to another. According to Pollinator.org, as many as 95% of the world’s flowering plants may rely on pollinators to reproduce and bear fruit — and that includes many of the plants we rely on for food. A decline in the populations of bees and other pollinators could dramatically impact human life if it’s not addressed.

But BeeMachine could help turn the situation around.

“This type of citizen science has the potential to get more eyes out there sighting bees than any single study could ever hope for,” Spiesman said, per KCUR. “Better tools for crowdsourcing are really important.”

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