Try taking a picture of each of North America's roughly 11,000 tree species, and you'll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots ' ranging from butterflies to humpback whales ' are a great research tool for ecologists because they provide evidence of organisms' unique behaviors, rare conditions, migration patterns, and responses to pollution and other forms of climate change. While comprehensive, nature image datasets aren't yet as useful as they could be. It's time-consuming to search these databases and retrieve the images most relevant to your hypothesis. You'd be better off with an automated research assistant ' or perhaps artificial intelligence systems called multimodal vision language models (VLMs). They're trained on both text and images, making it easier for them to pinpoint finer details, like the specific trees in the background of a photo. But just how well can VLMs assist nature researchers with...
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