Day 1: Highlights & Recap!
Thank you to everyone for joining us for the opening of ISMB 2022. It was great to welcome attendees from all over the world in-person & virtually. After two years, there's bound to be some dust to shake off. We greatly appreciate your patience as we worked through some technical issues. We hope you found the opening to be full of innovation and stellar science and amazing opportunities! See you tomorrow for another engaging and smoother day!
Highlights
Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf opened the conference with a fascinating talk on imageomics, using images as a source of information about wildlife populations.
Images are the most abundant source of information we have around us and we can make the most use of this information by putting technology to work for us. Using computers to look at images will not only allow us to look at more images, but to look at images more carefully. Computers are able to see things that the human eye can’t see—color variations, subtleties of patterns, minute shape differences—and are thus able to better identify important characteristics of organisms down to the individual level.
This ability to identify individual characteristics has been crucial to the workings of Dr. Berger-Wolf and colleagues’ Wildbook project, the goal of which is to improve animal monitoring procedures and develop innovative solutions to prevent extinction of species.
With the help of technology, the data extracted from the massive amount of images available from natural history collections, camera traps, field researchers, and citizen scientists (to name a few), provide information allowing conservationists and researchers to better understand migration patterns and conservation status of many species whose conservation data is currently classified as deficient.
The budding field of imageomics is an exciting, computational approach to assessing and quantifying biological traits, and is sure to play a key role in the development of new hypotheses, as well as in the development of conservation and wildlife policy decisions.
This talk is now available on ISMB On-Demand.
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