Tankred Ott

Abstract Historic data are essential for quantifying changes in biodiversity and their drivers. Much legacy data remains undigitized in archives, such as natural history museums, representing untapped resources for assessing past biodiversity patterns. In 1904, the first systematic survey of species distributions of the entire Danish vascular flora was initiated. Field surveys were essentially conducted in the early decades of the 20th century.

Abstract We present DiasMorph, a dataset of images and traits of diaspores from 1,442 taxa in 519 genera, and 96 families from Central Europe, totalling 94,214 records. The dataset was constructed following a standardised and reproducible image analysis method. The image dataset consists of diaspores against a high-contrast background, enabling a simple and efficient segmentation process.

Abstract The description of biological objects, such as seeds, mainly relies on manual measurements of few characteristics, and on visual classification of structures, both of which can be subjective, error prone and time-consuming. Image analysis tools offer means to address these shortcomings, but we currently lack a method capable of automatically handling seeds from different taxa with varying morphological attributes and obtaining interpretable results.