TY - JOUR
T1 - The Wood Image Analysis and Dataset (WIAD)
T2 - Open-access visual analysis tools to advance the ecological data revolution
AU - Rademacher, Tim
AU - Seyednasrollah, Bijan
AU - Basler, David
AU - Cheng, Jian
AU - Mandra, Tessa
AU - Miller, Elise
AU - Lin, Zuid
AU - Orwig, David A.
AU - Pederson, Neil
AU - Pfister, Hanspeter
AU - Wei, Donglai
AU - Yao, Li
AU - Richardson, Andrew D.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 British Ecological Society
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - Ecological data are collected and shared at an increasingly rapid pace, but it is often shared in inconsistent and untraceable processed forms. Images of wood contain a wealth of information such as colours and textures but are most commonly reduced to ring-width measurements before they can be shared in various common file formats. Archiving digital images of wood samples in libraries, which have been developed for ecological analysis and are publicly available, remains the exception. We developed the Wood Image Analysis and Dataset (WIAD), an open-source application including a web interface to integrate basic visual analysis of wood samples, such as increment cores, thin sections or X-ray films, basic data processing, and archiving of the images and derived data to facilitate transparency and reproducibility in studies using visual characteristics of wood. WIAD provides user-friendly tools to manipulate images of wood samples, mark and measure wood characteristics such as growth increments, density fluctuations, early- and latewood widths and fire scars, and to visualise, process and archive images, metadata, and the derived data. WIAD constitutes a step towards the reproducible automation of tree-ring analysis while establishing an open-source foundation to create improved community-developed repositories which would enable novel ecological studies harnessing the wealth of existing visual data.
AB - Ecological data are collected and shared at an increasingly rapid pace, but it is often shared in inconsistent and untraceable processed forms. Images of wood contain a wealth of information such as colours and textures but are most commonly reduced to ring-width measurements before they can be shared in various common file formats. Archiving digital images of wood samples in libraries, which have been developed for ecological analysis and are publicly available, remains the exception. We developed the Wood Image Analysis and Dataset (WIAD), an open-source application including a web interface to integrate basic visual analysis of wood samples, such as increment cores, thin sections or X-ray films, basic data processing, and archiving of the images and derived data to facilitate transparency and reproducibility in studies using visual characteristics of wood. WIAD provides user-friendly tools to manipulate images of wood samples, mark and measure wood characteristics such as growth increments, density fluctuations, early- and latewood widths and fire scars, and to visualise, process and archive images, metadata, and the derived data. WIAD constitutes a step towards the reproducible automation of tree-ring analysis while establishing an open-source foundation to create improved community-developed repositories which would enable novel ecological studies harnessing the wealth of existing visual data.
KW - Graphical User Interface
KW - automation
KW - data revolution
KW - dendrochronology
KW - dendroecology
KW - repository
KW - tree rings
KW - visual analysis
KW - wood
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U2 - 10.1111/2041-210X.13717
DO - 10.1111/2041-210X.13717
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85116261431
SN - 2041-210X
VL - 12
SP - 2379
EP - 2387
JO - Methods in Ecology and Evolution
JF - Methods in Ecology and Evolution
IS - 12
ER -