MorphOTU: A universal image-based framework for delineating biodiversity discovery (opens in new tab)

The absence of a scalable system for organizing the vast majority of unidentified species becomes the central obstacle in biodiversity science. Existing molecular and computer-vision methods rely on DNA material or closed-set labels, which hamper biodiversity quantification under the open, incomplete conditions that characterize real ecosystems. Here, we introduce morphOTUs, a general image-based framework that constructs operational units of biodiversity directly from phenotype. Using morphO...