Hi Ecologers, In 2016 I surveyed the community of plant biologists on Ecolog who phenotype stomata and it was clear from your responses that an automated tool to phenotype stomata would be welcomed by the community. My collaborators and I have created a publicly available convolutional neural network trained to identify stomata from 700 species of plants. The tool is available at http://www.stomata.science/ <http://www.stomata.science/> and you can read the manuscript describing the method on bioRxiv here <https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/21/327494>.
We are currently looking to expand the training data set used in the neural network so the method is more transferable to other sample preparation and microscopy settings. If you are interested in using the tool for a project, try uploading and annotating several dozen images. We will retrain the model to incorporate your images and the method should work very well for your own personal sample prep and microscopy settings. Thanks for the support and please contact me for questions! Sincerely, Karl Fetter Ph.D. Candidate Keller Lab Department of Plant Biology University of Vermont kfet...@uvm.edu
