New research using computer vision to analyse tens of thousands of butterfly specimens in the Natural History Museum's collection has found that some British butterflies are getting bigger in response to climate change.
An international team from London’s Natural History Museum, the University of Southampton and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California have used the Natural History Museum’s digitised butterfly collections to evaluate the impact of climate change on British butterfly species size. The most common findings suggest that adult butterfly body size increase with temperature during the late larval stages of development.
The research, published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, was conducted on one of the largest butterfly collections in the world at the Natural History Museum which has approximately 125,000 specimens.
Digitisation of these species has helped scientific research into the impact of climate change on wild species.
Read more at University of Southampton
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