The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $278,631 Project Grant under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. The grant, awarded on September 15, 2024, will be used to update and expand the existing DARWIN software application that identifies individual dolphins and other animals like Alaskan brown bears through photographic recognition. The project aims to modernize the user interface, increase file support capacity, and incorporate machine learning methods to improve the accuracy and efficiency of reidentifying individual animals from photographs. This will enable biologists to focus more time on analyzing field data rather than the time-consuming process of manually matching animal photos. The improved software will also have broader applications beyond just marine biology, serving researchers in other fields who need to automate the recognition of individual objects or animals based on their outlines. In addition to the software development, the grant will provide opportunities for undergraduate students to gain software development experience and host workshops for high school students on the importance and automation of identifying individual animals in the wild.
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