Garryanalyzer: A morphometric workflow and open-source ImageJ plug-in for quantitative morphological analysis of Pacific Northwest Quercus leaves.

Abstract

Premise Accurate species identification is crucial for ecological restoration and can be especially challenging for understudied non-model species. Quercus garryana is the only native oak species in the Pacific Northwest and is an important component of the endangered oak savanna ecosystem. Quercus robur is an imported ornamental species from Europe and has been found to be mistakenly planted as Q. garryana in habitat restoration projects. Methods We measured leaf morphological traits sampled from herbarium collections in their native ranges using the digital morphometric tools MorphoLeaf and Tomato Analyzer. We then used Lasso logistic analysis to generate a predictive model and tested it on leaves from Portland, Oregon. To streamline this species detection process, we developed Garryanalyzer, an ImageJ plug-in that automatically measures leaf traits and outputs species predictions. Results Garryanalyzer demonstrated 95% accuracy in predicting the species identity of herbarium specimens of oaks. Garryanalyzer correctly identified all Q. robur individuals sampled in Portland but showed lower accuracy for Q. garryana . Discussion Many existing morphometric software are not open source, which makes them unable to be customized to specific study systems. Garryanalyzer is built upon the widely used open-source ImageJ platform. This study also demonstrates a viable workflow for developing similar tools for other ecologically important non-model plant species.

Plant phenotyping relevance

葉の形態形質を自動測定し、種予測まで行うImageJプラグインとワークフローの開発・評価が中心であり、植物フェノタイピング手法として適格です。

Code and data availability

The paper's authors publicly released the Garryanalyzer ImageJ plug-in source code on GitHub, all original and modified leaf images used in the morphometric analyses on Zenodo, and the full leaf morphometric measurement dataset plus R Lasso analysis code in a second Zenodo repository. All are paper-specific, public,可直接