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Using the compose program developed by the Yale Team, we are now able to create a singular composite image containing all pose images for each specimen. These composite images allow for efficient visualization and file storage.

After refining the path created by the spherical path program, we are now focusing on producing test imaging batches of databased specimens. These specimens are selected based on label diversity (ex., text type, number of labels, label size, text size) in order to capture and assess a wide range of preservation scenarios seen across collections.

This program automatically calculates a path with equally spaced poses around a target given an input elevation range, azimuth ranges for two cameras, target location, number of poses per camera, and constant radius. With every pose being a constant distance from the specimen and labels, the total number of failed or out-of-focus images is greatly minimized.

Zoe Flores has joined the Harvard LightningBug Team with the task of developing system paths and workflows for specimen label capture and 3D imaging. Zoe has continuously worked in the Harvard MCZ entomology collections over the past few years as an undergraduate intern and senior thesis researcher. She received her BA in Integrative Biology from Harvard College in 2022.

The Yale Team delivered, assembled, and set up the second functional COPIS system at the Harvard MCZ entomology department.

The Harvard Team took a trip down to Yale to see the functional COPIS system currently being used by the anthropology department.

The NSF-Innovation: Bioinformatics: Collaborative Research: LightningBug, An Integrated Pipeline to Overcome the Biodiversity Digitization Gap. August 2021 to August 2024. $1,076,032 NSF Awards # 2104149 (Rios), 2104152 (Guralnick), 2104151 (Hereld), 2104150 (Pierce).

The LightningBug team sponsored two community webinars and made a formal presentation to a panel from the National Academy of Sciences. We engaged several additional unfunded collaborators including the Field Museum, the Smithsonian, and the California Academy of Sciences. The first proposal submitted to NSF in October, 2019 and a re-submission in November 2020.

We began informal meetings, primarily with Argonne National Laboratory (Mark Hereld), Yale Peabody Museum (Nelson Rios and Larry Gall) Harvard (Crystal Maier) and SCAN (Neil Cobb). By the fall, 2019 the group had grown to include Rob Guralnick and Michael Denslow (the University of Florida, Notes from Nature) and international partners CSIRO-National Research Collections Australia (Nicole Fisher and Simon Checksfield) and the Natural History Museum – London (Ben Price).

The Beyond the Box Digitization Competition planned to award up to $1 million to the person or team who creates an automated technology that increases the speed and accuracy of digitization of a drawer of insect specimens and their associated data. The Competition was a joint effort of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), with NSF serving as the Sponsor and AIBS serving as the Organizer. No one submitted an entry for the competition.

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