Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!
This project does not have any active data and is completed for now. Read more on this talk post. To browse other active projects that still need your classifications, check out zooniverse.org/projects.
The Team
The team
- Luca Pegoraro (Project Lead)
- Luca is a postdoc working on developing and applying new technology to ecological research. He completed his PhD on the evolution of a plant family in the Alps in 2020, but he has been working primarily with electronics and coding since. He is interested in both in hardware (e.g. field cameras) and software (machine learning) to enhance monitoring of organisms in natural environments, with the goal of providing more and better data to tackle the biodiversity crisis. He hopes to help bridge the gap between tech and biological research, and remains deeply passionate about understanding the natural world.
- Suman Saha (Data Scientist)
- Suman is contributing to the project as senior Data Scientist at the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) and Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Zürich, Switzerland. Suman earned his PhD in Computer Science and Mathematics from Oxford Brookes University in 2017, focusing on spatiotemporal human action localization with deep learning. He pursued postdoctoral research at Oxford Brookes and ETH Zurich, where he worked on unsupervised domain adaptation, vision-based biometrics, and multi-task learning. His research also included semi-supervised semantic segmentation, self-supervised depth estimation, and designing deep generative models for facial expression learning during an internship at Disney Research Zurich.
- Michele Volpi (Senior data scientist)
- Michele earned his Ph.D. in applied machine learning and geoinformatics for environmental sciences from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in 2013. He was a visiting postdoc in the CALVIN group at the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland from 2014 to 2016, where he worked in computer vision methods. From 2016 to 2017, he joined the Multimodal Remote Sensing and Geocomputation groups at the Geography department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, working on applied computer vision and machine learning for geospatial and Earth observation data. Currently, Michele is a data science team lead at the Swiss Data Science Center where he works on and coordinates projects related to applications of machine learning and computer vision in environmental sciences and other disciplines.
- Catherine Graham (Senior scientist)
- Since 2016, Prof. Catherine Graham has been the group leader for the Spatial Evolutionary Ecology group at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL). Her work primarily focuses on the use of statistical models to understand species distributions, ecological interactions and their relationships with morphological traits, with a focus on hummingbirds and hummingbird-pollinated plants. This project is part of an effort to expand the toolbox of ecologists and thus improves the data available for modeling and better understanding drivers of biodiversity and interactions.
- Kerstin Niedermaier (Field assistant, Scientific collaborator, Zooniverse moderator)
- Kerstin joined the team as an intern in the summer of 2022. She has been involved in all parts of the project from data collection in the field to initial analyses of our videos and images to assisting with the creation of our Zooniverse project. Her background is in biology, and she completed her master's degree in forest ecology in 2022 before joining the team and entering the world of alpine pollination ecology. Whether she is studying forest Carbon dynamics or Alpine plant pollination, she is happy to be involved in research to help us better understand our changing planet.
- Alessandro Gregori (Field assistant, Scientific collaborator)
- During the 2022 field season, Alessandro was instrumental in preparing the equipment, building the cameras, and executing the field work at Furka Pass. Before working on this project, Alessandro worked as a technician at the WSL dendrochronology lab and at the Physiological Plant Ecology Group of the Botanical Institute, University of Basel mainly working in the stable isotope lab. During this time his interest of the technical applications in the field of natural sciences grew. He will start his Bachelor in Data Science at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. His work in the field collecting data, making in-person insect observations, and identifying species in the field were critical for the collection of useful field videos/images for analysis on Zooniverse and beyond.
- Matilde Allmeling (Zooniverse Collaborator)
- Matilde is 17 years old and currently attending the Gymnasium Freudenberg in Zurich. As part of her school curriculum she had the opportunity to do a one-week internship at WSL. There, she had the chance to work with a great team on the Zooniverse Alpine Bug Shot project and learned a lot about insects in the Swiss Alps. Since she would like to study in the scientific field, this experience aligned well with her future plans. Her work to create this page was indispensable to our project.
Kerstin and Alessandro in the field conducting a floral neighborhood count.
