EcoMorph: Universal morphological trait quantification from natural language prompts for ecological research

Abstract

0. Morphological traits such as floral area and body size are fundamental to ecological research, serving as inputs for studies of pollinator–plant interactions, habitat quality, and biodiversity monitoring. However, accurately measuring these traits from images remains challenging, particularly in complex field conditions where existing tools exhibit reduced accuracy and limited generalizability across taxa. We present EcoMorph, a modular morphological measurement system that leverages the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) to quantify traits across diverse ecological contexts. Unlike task-specific segmentation models requiring domain-specific training data, SAM3’s prompt-based architecture enables segmentation of arbitrary biological structures from natural-language prompts, using the same underlying model across flowers, insects, and other targets without retraining. From the resulting segmentations, EcoMorph extracts three classes of measurement: area, linear dimensions, and object counts. We validated EcoMorph across two ecological scales. At the intermediate scale, EcoMorph-derived floral area agreed closely with manual ImageJ measurements (R 2 = 0.935, n = 74) under simple-background conditions and (R 2 = 0.928, n = 58) under complex-background conditions, with valid predictions for 95% of images. At the fine scale, EcoMorph-derived insect body area was strongly correlated with hand-measured intertegular distance (r = 0.810, n = 349), capturing body-size variation across species from the small Bombus impatiens to the large Xylocopa virginica . Object counts matched manual counts almost exactly for well-separated insects in an insect box (R 2 = 0.9997, n = 12). By combining prompt-based segmentation with modular measurement, EcoMorph enables high-throughput quantification of area, size, and abundance from heterogeneous image sources without taxon-specific training. This generality supports a broad range of ecological applications, including pollinator and plant trait research, biodiversity and abundance monitoring, and allometric biomass estimation.

Plant phenotyping relevance

画像から花の面積など植物形態形質を抽出する汎用システムを開発し、手動測定との一致で検証しており、植物フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's Data and code availability statement provides a public Zenodo deposit containing the validation datasets and code used for the EcoMorph phenotyping measurements (floral area, insect morphometrics, counts), plus a public web deployment of the EcoMorph software itself.