From microscopic images of cells to wildlife photos and satellite footage, imagery plays an essential role in documenting and analyzing our natural world. This exhibit showcases how scientists document biodiversity, using text and images to identify species in the wild and analyze their characteristics and behaviors. This information is critical to understanding patterns in the more than 3.7-billion-year history of life on Earth and predicting the future effects of environmental change.

The volume and variety of biological imagery available — historical photos as well as the new citizen-scientist contributions, remote sensor data, x-rays and scans of internal structures, and more being generated daily — present both opportunities and challenges in addressing pressing questions about biodiversity. Breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence are helping scientists analyze and extract biological information from the scores of online images. At the same time, cross-institutional collaborations are enabling new biodiversity research on a much larger scale than ever before.