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Article . 2026 . Peer-reviewed
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ZENODO
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EcoMorph: Universal morphological trait quantification from natural language prompts for ecological research

Authors: Amoah, Edward Idun; Bunch, Zachary; Thomas, Hannah M.; Patch, Harland M.; Grozinger, Christina M.;

EcoMorph: Universal morphological trait quantification from natural language prompts for ecological research

Abstract

0. Abstract Morphological traits such as floral area and body size are fundamental to ecological research, serving as inputs for studies of pollinator–plant interactions, habitat quality, and biodiversity monitoring. However, accurately measuring these traits from images remains challenging, particularly in complex field conditions where existing tools exhibit reduced accuracy and limited generalizability across taxa. We present EcoMorph, a modular morphological measurement system that leverages the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) to quantify traits across diverse ecological contexts. Unlike task-specific segmentation models requiring domain-specific training data, SAM3’s prompt-based architecture enables segmentation of arbitrary biological structures from natural-language prompts, using the same underlying model across flowers, insects, and other targets without retraining. From the resulting segmentations, EcoMorph extracts three classes of measurement: area, linear dimensions, and object counts. We validated EcoMorph across two ecological scales. At the intermediate scale, EcoMorph-derived floral area agreed closely with manual ImageJ measurements (R 2 = 0.935, n = 74) under simple-background conditions and (R 2 = 0.928, n = 58) under complex-background conditions, with valid predictions for 95% of images. At the fine scale, EcoMorph-derived insect body area was strongly correlated with hand-measured intertegular distance (r = 0.810, n = 349), capturing body-size variation across species from the small Bombus impatiens to the large Xylocopa virginica . Object counts matched manual counts almost exactly for well-separated insects in an insect box (R 2 = 0.9997, n = 12). By combining prompt-based segmentation with modular measurement, EcoMorph enables high-throughput quantification of area, size, and abundance from heterogeneous image sources without taxon-specific training. This generality supports a broad range of ecological applications, including pollinator and plant trait research, biodiversity and abundance monitoring, and allometric biomass estimation.

Keywords

Segment Anything Model, image analysis, pollinator ecology, morphological trait, floral area estimation, body size, visual foundation models

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
Related to Research communities
Italian National Biodiversity Future Center