Willem-pier Vellinga - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Willem-pier Vellinga

Polymer, 2006

The self-adhesion of a variety of polydimethylsiloxanes (PDMS) has been investigated using a newl... more The self-adhesion of a variety of polydimethylsiloxanes (PDMS) has been investigated using a newly developed JKR apparatus that can also determine the associated friction behaviour of the same sample. The results have been interpreted using the complete JKR model by incorporating the indentation data also in the analysis. By varying the molecular mass M c of PDMS from 6 to 28 kg/mol the elastic modulus E decreases from 1.16 to 0.71 MPa while the work of adhesion remains about constant. In contrast measurements of the friction of the same systems indicate an increase of the friction force. Introduction of dangling chains leads to a strong decrease of E from 1.16 to 0.56 MPa for low M c and from 0.71 to 0.09 MPa for high M c and again only to minor changes in W. The latter results can be understood from an inward distribution of the dangling ends.

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2018

The BirdCLEF challenge offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird... more The BirdCLEF challenge offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird species identification based on audio recordings of their sounds. One of its strengths is that it uses data collected through Xeno-canto, the worldwide community of bird sound recordists. This ensures that BirdCLEF is close to the conditions of realworld application, in particular with regard to the number of species in the training set (1500). Two main scenarios are evaluated: (i) the identification of a particular bird species in a recording, and (ii), the recognition of all species vocalising in a long sequence (up to one hour) of raw soundscapes that can contain tens of birds singing more or less simultaneously. This paper reports an overview of the systems developed by the six participating research groups, the methodology of the evaluation of their performance, and an analysis and discussion of the results obtained.

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2016

The LifeCLEF bird identification challenge provides a largescale testbed for the system-oriented ... more The LifeCLEF bird identification challenge provides a largescale testbed for the system-oriented evaluation of bird species identification based on audio recordings. One of its main strength is that the data used for the evaluation is collected through Xeno-Canto, the largest network of bird sound recordists in the world. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application than previous, similar initiatives. The main novelty of the 2016-th edition of the challenge was the inclusion of soundscape recordings in addition to the usual xeno-canto recordings that focus on a single foreground species. This paper reports the methodology of the conducted evaluation, the overview of the systems experimented by the 6 participating research groups and a synthetic analysis of the obtained results.

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2015

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2020

Passive acoustic monitoring is a cornerstone of the assessment of ecosystem health and the improv... more Passive acoustic monitoring is a cornerstone of the assessment of ecosystem health and the improvement of automated assessment systems has the potential to have a transformative impact on global biodiversity monitoring, at a scale and level of detail that is impossible with manual annotation or other more traditional methods. The BirdCLEF challenge-as part of the 2020 LifeCLEF Lab [12]-focuses on the development of reliable detection systems for avian vocalizations in continuous soundscape data. The goal of the task is to localize and identify all audible birds within the provided soundscape test set. This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluation as well as the synthesis of the main results and lessons learned.

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2017

The LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluation of 999 ... more The LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluation of 999 bird species identification. The main originality of this data is that it was specifically built through a citizen science initiative conducted by Xeno-Canto, an international social network of amateur and expert ornithologists. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application than previous, similar initiatives. This overview presents the resources and the assessments of the task, summarizes the retrieval approaches employed by the participating groups, and provides an analysis of the main evaluation results.

Xeno-canto (XC) is an online database that provides access to sound recordings of wild birds from... more Xeno-canto (XC) is an online database that provides access to sound recordings of wild birds from around the world. The recordings are shared by a growing community of thousands of recordists from around the world, amateur birdwatchers and professionals alike. The aim of Xeno-canto is to have representation of all bird sounds, meaning all taxa, to subspecies level, their complete repertoire, all of the geographic variability, at all stages of development. The website of Xeno-canto (www.xeno-canto.org) was launched in 2005. It is run by the Xeno-canto Foundation for Nature Sounds in The Netherlands, with support from Naturalis Biodiversity Center. Please note that the Xeno-canto dataset shared on GBIF is currently a subset of the entire XC collection. Only the recordings by recordists who have given their permission to share recording metadata with GBIF are shared at the moment. We expect the dataset to increase over time, as more recordists give permission to share data with GBIF.

Abstract. The LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluati... more Abstract. The LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluation of 501 bird species identification. The main originality of this data is that it was specifically built through a citizen science initiative conducted by Xeno-Canto, an international social net-work of amateur and expert ornithologists. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application than previous, similar ini-tiatives. This overview presents the resources and the assessments of the task, summarizes the retrieval approaches employed by the participating groups, and provides an analysis of the main evaluation results. With a total of ten groups from seven countries and with a total of twenty-nine runs submitted, involving distinct and original methods, this first year task confirms the interest of the audio retrieval community for biodiver-sity and ornithology, and highlights further challenging studies in bird identification.

The BirdCLEF challenge-as part of the 2019 LifeCLEF Lab [7]-offers a large-scale proving ground f... more The BirdCLEF challenge-as part of the 2019 LifeCLEF Lab [7]-offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird species identification based on audio recordings. The challenge uses data collected through Xeno-canto, the worldwide community of bird sound recordists. This ensures that BirdCLEF is close to the conditions of real-world application, in particular with regard to the number of species in the training set (659). In 2019, the challenge was focused on the difficult task of recognizing all birds vocalizing in omni-directional soundscape recordings. Therefore, the dataset of the previous year was extended with more than 350 hours of manually annotated soundscapes that were recorded using 30 field recorders in Ithaca (NY, USA). This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluation as well as the synthesis of the main results and lessons learned.

Identifying and naming living plants or animals is usually impossible for the general public and ... more Identifying and naming living plants or animals is usually impossible for the general public and often a difficult task for professionals and naturalists. Bridging this gap is a key challenge towards enabling effective biodiversity information retrieval systems. This taxonomic gap was actually already identified as one of the main ecological challenges to be solved during the Rio de Janeiro United Nations “Earth Summit” in 1992. Since 2011, the LifeCLEF challenges conducted in the context of the CLEF evaluation forum have been boosting and evaluating the advances in this domain. Data collections with an unprecedented volume and diversity have been shared with the scientific community to allow repeatable and long-term experiments. This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluation campaigns as well as providing a synthesis of the main results and lessons learned along the years.

The BirdCLEF challenge offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird... more The BirdCLEF challenge offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird species identification based on au- dio recordings of their sounds. One of its strengths is that it uses data collected through Xeno-canto, the worldwide community of bird sound recordists. This ensures that BirdCLEF is close to the conditions of real- world application, in particular with regard to the number of species in the training set (1500). Two main scenarios are evaluated: (i) the identifi- cation of a particular bird species in a recording, and (ii), the recognition of all species vocalising in a long sequence (up to one hour) of raw sound- scapes that can contain tens of birds singing more or less simultaneously. This paper reports an overview of the systems developed by the six participating research groups, the methodology of the evaluation of their performance, and an analysis and discussion of the results obtained.

Despite 150 years of ornithological exploration the northern Cordillera Central of Peru still hol... more Despite 150 years of ornithological exploration the northern Cordillera Central of Peru still holds potential for discovery. New trails and roads in once inaccessible terrain provide fresh opportunity to contribute to our knowledge of avian distribution in this fascinating area. We discuss the results of avian inventories undertaken near Leimebamba, dpto. Amazonas, and place these into a historical perspective. The paper is organised thus: the biogeography of the northern Cordillera Central is discussed first, then the achievements of earlier explorers of the region. Thereafter, the results of our investigations of the Leimebamba area in 2000, 2002 and 2003 are presented, followed by a discussion and conclusions.

This paper discusses distinguishing characteristics of the Xeno- canto bird sound collection. The... more This paper discusses distinguishing characteristics of the Xeno- canto bird sound collection. The main aim is to indicate the relation between automated recognition of bird sounds (or feature recognition in digital recordings more generally) and curating large bioacoustics col- lections. Not only do large collections make it easier to design robust algorithmic approaches to automated species classiers, those same al- gorithms should also become useful in determining the actual content of the collections.

Passive acoustic monitoring is a cornerstone of the assessment of ecosystem health and the improv... more Passive acoustic monitoring is a cornerstone of the assessment of ecosystem health and the improvement of automated assessment systems has the potential to have a transformative impact on global biodiversity monitoring, at a scale and level of detail that is impossible with manual annotation or other more traditional methods. The BirdCLEF challenge—as part of the 2020 LifeCLEF Lab [12]—focuses on the development of reliable detection systems for avian vocalizations in continuous soundscape data. The goal of the task is to localize and identify all audible birds within the provided soundscape test set. This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluation as well as the synthesis of the main results and lessons learned.

Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of spe... more Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of species is essential for the sustainable development of humanity, as well as for biodiversity conservation. However, the difficulty of identifying plants and animals in the field is hindering the aggregation of new data and knowledge. Identifying and naming living plants or animals is almost impossible for the general public and is often difficult even for professionals and naturalists. Bridging this gap is a key step towards enabling effective biodiversity monitoring systems. The LifeCLEF campaign, presented in this paper, has been promoting and evaluating advances in this domain since 2011. The 2021 edition proposes four data-oriented challenges related to the identification and prediction of biodiversity: (i) PlantCLEF: cross-domain plant identification based on herbarium sheets, (ii) BirdCLEF: bird species recognition in audio soundscapes, (iii) GeoLifeCLEF: location-based prediction of species based on environmental and occurrence data and (iv) Snake-CLEF: image-based snake identification.

Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographicdistribution and the evolution of livi... more Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographicdistribution and the evolution of living species is essentialfor a sustainable development of humanity as well as forbiodiversity conservation. In this context, using multimediaidentication tools is considered as one of the most promisingsolution to help bridging the taxonomic gap. With therecent advances in digital devices/equipment, network bandwidthand information storage capacities, the production ofmultimedia big data has indeed become an easy task. In parallel,the emergence of citizen sciences and social networkingtools has fostered the creation of large and structured communitiesof nature observers (e.g. eBird, Xeno-canto, TelaBotanica, etc.) that have started to produce outstandingcollections of multimedia records. Unfortunately, the performanceof the state-of-the-art multimedia analysis techniqueson such data is still not well understood and is far fromreaching the real world's requirements in terms of identi-ca...

Advances in Information Retrieval, 2020

Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of spe... more Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of species is essential for the sustainable development of humanity, as well as for biodiversity conservation. However, the difficulty of identifying plants and animals in the field is hindering the aggregation of new data and knowledge. Identifying and naming living plants or animals is almost impossible for the general public and is often difficult even for professionals and naturalists. Bridging this gap is a key step towards enabling effective biodiversity monitoring systems. The LifeCLEF campaign, presented in this paper, has been promoting and evaluating advances in this domain since 2011. The 2020 edition proposes four data-oriented challenges related to the identification and prediction of biodiversity: (i) PlantCLEF: cross-domain plant identification based on herbarium sheets, (ii) BirdCLEF: bird species recognition in audio soundscapes, (iii) GeoLifeCLEF: location-based prediction of species based on environmental and occurrence data, and (iv) Snake-CLEF: image-based snake identification.

Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, 2019

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, 2018

Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of liv... more Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of living species is essential for a sustainable development of humanity, as well as for biodiversity conservation. Unfortunately, such basic information is often only partially available for professional stakeholders, teachers, scientists and citizens, and often incomplete for ecosystems that possess the highest diversity. In this context, an ultimate ambition is to set up innovative information systems relying on the automated identification and understanding of living organisms as a means to engage massive crowds of observers and boost the production of biodiversity and agro-biodiversity data. The LifeCLEF 2018 initiative proposes three data-oriented challenges related to this vision, in the continuity of the previous editions, but with several consistent novelties intended to push the boundaries of the state-of-the-art in several research directions. This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluations as well as the synthesis of the main results and lessons learned.

Polymer, 2006

The self-adhesion of a variety of polydimethylsiloxanes (PDMS) has been investigated using a newl... more The self-adhesion of a variety of polydimethylsiloxanes (PDMS) has been investigated using a newly developed JKR apparatus that can also determine the associated friction behaviour of the same sample. The results have been interpreted using the complete JKR model by incorporating the indentation data also in the analysis. By varying the molecular mass M c of PDMS from 6 to 28 kg/mol the elastic modulus E decreases from 1.16 to 0.71 MPa while the work of adhesion remains about constant. In contrast measurements of the friction of the same systems indicate an increase of the friction force. Introduction of dangling chains leads to a strong decrease of E from 1.16 to 0.56 MPa for low M c and from 0.71 to 0.09 MPa for high M c and again only to minor changes in W. The latter results can be understood from an inward distribution of the dangling ends.

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2018

The BirdCLEF challenge offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird... more The BirdCLEF challenge offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird species identification based on audio recordings of their sounds. One of its strengths is that it uses data collected through Xeno-canto, the worldwide community of bird sound recordists. This ensures that BirdCLEF is close to the conditions of realworld application, in particular with regard to the number of species in the training set (1500). Two main scenarios are evaluated: (i) the identification of a particular bird species in a recording, and (ii), the recognition of all species vocalising in a long sequence (up to one hour) of raw soundscapes that can contain tens of birds singing more or less simultaneously. This paper reports an overview of the systems developed by the six participating research groups, the methodology of the evaluation of their performance, and an analysis and discussion of the results obtained.

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2016

The LifeCLEF bird identification challenge provides a largescale testbed for the system-oriented ... more The LifeCLEF bird identification challenge provides a largescale testbed for the system-oriented evaluation of bird species identification based on audio recordings. One of its main strength is that the data used for the evaluation is collected through Xeno-Canto, the largest network of bird sound recordists in the world. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application than previous, similar initiatives. The main novelty of the 2016-th edition of the challenge was the inclusion of soundscape recordings in addition to the usual xeno-canto recordings that focus on a single foreground species. This paper reports the methodology of the conducted evaluation, the overview of the systems experimented by the 6 participating research groups and a synthetic analysis of the obtained results.

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2015

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2020

Passive acoustic monitoring is a cornerstone of the assessment of ecosystem health and the improv... more Passive acoustic monitoring is a cornerstone of the assessment of ecosystem health and the improvement of automated assessment systems has the potential to have a transformative impact on global biodiversity monitoring, at a scale and level of detail that is impossible with manual annotation or other more traditional methods. The BirdCLEF challenge-as part of the 2020 LifeCLEF Lab [12]-focuses on the development of reliable detection systems for avian vocalizations in continuous soundscape data. The goal of the task is to localize and identify all audible birds within the provided soundscape test set. This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluation as well as the synthesis of the main results and lessons learned.

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, 2017

The LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluation of 999 ... more The LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluation of 999 bird species identification. The main originality of this data is that it was specifically built through a citizen science initiative conducted by Xeno-Canto, an international social network of amateur and expert ornithologists. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application than previous, similar initiatives. This overview presents the resources and the assessments of the task, summarizes the retrieval approaches employed by the participating groups, and provides an analysis of the main evaluation results.

Xeno-canto (XC) is an online database that provides access to sound recordings of wild birds from... more Xeno-canto (XC) is an online database that provides access to sound recordings of wild birds from around the world. The recordings are shared by a growing community of thousands of recordists from around the world, amateur birdwatchers and professionals alike. The aim of Xeno-canto is to have representation of all bird sounds, meaning all taxa, to subspecies level, their complete repertoire, all of the geographic variability, at all stages of development. The website of Xeno-canto (www.xeno-canto.org) was launched in 2005. It is run by the Xeno-canto Foundation for Nature Sounds in The Netherlands, with support from Naturalis Biodiversity Center. Please note that the Xeno-canto dataset shared on GBIF is currently a subset of the entire XC collection. Only the recordings by recordists who have given their permission to share recording metadata with GBIF are shared at the moment. We expect the dataset to increase over time, as more recordists give permission to share data with GBIF.

Abstract. The LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluati... more Abstract. The LifeCLEF bird identification task provides a testbed for a system-oriented evaluation of 501 bird species identification. The main originality of this data is that it was specifically built through a citizen science initiative conducted by Xeno-Canto, an international social net-work of amateur and expert ornithologists. This makes the task closer to the conditions of a real-world application than previous, similar ini-tiatives. This overview presents the resources and the assessments of the task, summarizes the retrieval approaches employed by the participating groups, and provides an analysis of the main evaluation results. With a total of ten groups from seven countries and with a total of twenty-nine runs submitted, involving distinct and original methods, this first year task confirms the interest of the audio retrieval community for biodiver-sity and ornithology, and highlights further challenging studies in bird identification.

The BirdCLEF challenge-as part of the 2019 LifeCLEF Lab [7]-offers a large-scale proving ground f... more The BirdCLEF challenge-as part of the 2019 LifeCLEF Lab [7]-offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird species identification based on audio recordings. The challenge uses data collected through Xeno-canto, the worldwide community of bird sound recordists. This ensures that BirdCLEF is close to the conditions of real-world application, in particular with regard to the number of species in the training set (659). In 2019, the challenge was focused on the difficult task of recognizing all birds vocalizing in omni-directional soundscape recordings. Therefore, the dataset of the previous year was extended with more than 350 hours of manually annotated soundscapes that were recorded using 30 field recorders in Ithaca (NY, USA). This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluation as well as the synthesis of the main results and lessons learned.

Identifying and naming living plants or animals is usually impossible for the general public and ... more Identifying and naming living plants or animals is usually impossible for the general public and often a difficult task for professionals and naturalists. Bridging this gap is a key challenge towards enabling effective biodiversity information retrieval systems. This taxonomic gap was actually already identified as one of the main ecological challenges to be solved during the Rio de Janeiro United Nations “Earth Summit” in 1992. Since 2011, the LifeCLEF challenges conducted in the context of the CLEF evaluation forum have been boosting and evaluating the advances in this domain. Data collections with an unprecedented volume and diversity have been shared with the scientific community to allow repeatable and long-term experiments. This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluation campaigns as well as providing a synthesis of the main results and lessons learned along the years.

The BirdCLEF challenge offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird... more The BirdCLEF challenge offers a large-scale proving ground for system-oriented evaluation of bird species identification based on au- dio recordings of their sounds. One of its strengths is that it uses data collected through Xeno-canto, the worldwide community of bird sound recordists. This ensures that BirdCLEF is close to the conditions of real- world application, in particular with regard to the number of species in the training set (1500). Two main scenarios are evaluated: (i) the identifi- cation of a particular bird species in a recording, and (ii), the recognition of all species vocalising in a long sequence (up to one hour) of raw sound- scapes that can contain tens of birds singing more or less simultaneously. This paper reports an overview of the systems developed by the six participating research groups, the methodology of the evaluation of their performance, and an analysis and discussion of the results obtained.

Despite 150 years of ornithological exploration the northern Cordillera Central of Peru still hol... more Despite 150 years of ornithological exploration the northern Cordillera Central of Peru still holds potential for discovery. New trails and roads in once inaccessible terrain provide fresh opportunity to contribute to our knowledge of avian distribution in this fascinating area. We discuss the results of avian inventories undertaken near Leimebamba, dpto. Amazonas, and place these into a historical perspective. The paper is organised thus: the biogeography of the northern Cordillera Central is discussed first, then the achievements of earlier explorers of the region. Thereafter, the results of our investigations of the Leimebamba area in 2000, 2002 and 2003 are presented, followed by a discussion and conclusions.

This paper discusses distinguishing characteristics of the Xeno- canto bird sound collection. The... more This paper discusses distinguishing characteristics of the Xeno- canto bird sound collection. The main aim is to indicate the relation between automated recognition of bird sounds (or feature recognition in digital recordings more generally) and curating large bioacoustics col- lections. Not only do large collections make it easier to design robust algorithmic approaches to automated species classiers, those same al- gorithms should also become useful in determining the actual content of the collections.

Passive acoustic monitoring is a cornerstone of the assessment of ecosystem health and the improv... more Passive acoustic monitoring is a cornerstone of the assessment of ecosystem health and the improvement of automated assessment systems has the potential to have a transformative impact on global biodiversity monitoring, at a scale and level of detail that is impossible with manual annotation or other more traditional methods. The BirdCLEF challenge—as part of the 2020 LifeCLEF Lab [12]—focuses on the development of reliable detection systems for avian vocalizations in continuous soundscape data. The goal of the task is to localize and identify all audible birds within the provided soundscape test set. This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluation as well as the synthesis of the main results and lessons learned.

Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of spe... more Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of species is essential for the sustainable development of humanity, as well as for biodiversity conservation. However, the difficulty of identifying plants and animals in the field is hindering the aggregation of new data and knowledge. Identifying and naming living plants or animals is almost impossible for the general public and is often difficult even for professionals and naturalists. Bridging this gap is a key step towards enabling effective biodiversity monitoring systems. The LifeCLEF campaign, presented in this paper, has been promoting and evaluating advances in this domain since 2011. The 2021 edition proposes four data-oriented challenges related to the identification and prediction of biodiversity: (i) PlantCLEF: cross-domain plant identification based on herbarium sheets, (ii) BirdCLEF: bird species recognition in audio soundscapes, (iii) GeoLifeCLEF: location-based prediction of species based on environmental and occurrence data and (iv) Snake-CLEF: image-based snake identification.

Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographicdistribution and the evolution of livi... more Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographicdistribution and the evolution of living species is essentialfor a sustainable development of humanity as well as forbiodiversity conservation. In this context, using multimediaidentication tools is considered as one of the most promisingsolution to help bridging the taxonomic gap. With therecent advances in digital devices/equipment, network bandwidthand information storage capacities, the production ofmultimedia big data has indeed become an easy task. In parallel,the emergence of citizen sciences and social networkingtools has fostered the creation of large and structured communitiesof nature observers (e.g. eBird, Xeno-canto, TelaBotanica, etc.) that have started to produce outstandingcollections of multimedia records. Unfortunately, the performanceof the state-of-the-art multimedia analysis techniqueson such data is still not well understood and is far fromreaching the real world's requirements in terms of identi-ca...

Advances in Information Retrieval, 2020

Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of spe... more Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of species is essential for the sustainable development of humanity, as well as for biodiversity conservation. However, the difficulty of identifying plants and animals in the field is hindering the aggregation of new data and knowledge. Identifying and naming living plants or animals is almost impossible for the general public and is often difficult even for professionals and naturalists. Bridging this gap is a key step towards enabling effective biodiversity monitoring systems. The LifeCLEF campaign, presented in this paper, has been promoting and evaluating advances in this domain since 2011. The 2020 edition proposes four data-oriented challenges related to the identification and prediction of biodiversity: (i) PlantCLEF: cross-domain plant identification based on herbarium sheets, (ii) BirdCLEF: bird species recognition in audio soundscapes, (iii) GeoLifeCLEF: location-based prediction of species based on environmental and occurrence data, and (iv) Snake-CLEF: image-based snake identification.

Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, 2019

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, 2018

Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of liv... more Building accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of living species is essential for a sustainable development of humanity, as well as for biodiversity conservation. Unfortunately, such basic information is often only partially available for professional stakeholders, teachers, scientists and citizens, and often incomplete for ecosystems that possess the highest diversity. In this context, an ultimate ambition is to set up innovative information systems relying on the automated identification and understanding of living organisms as a means to engage massive crowds of observers and boost the production of biodiversity and agro-biodiversity data. The LifeCLEF 2018 initiative proposes three data-oriented challenges related to this vision, in the continuity of the previous editions, but with several consistent novelties intended to push the boundaries of the state-of-the-art in several research directions. This paper describes the methodology of the conducted evaluations as well as the synthesis of the main results and lessons learned.