Gavin Huw Thomas

PlumageParts provides a dataset of 4,705 bird images annotated for nine plumage regions and benchmarks segmentation models, achieving 84.01% mean Intersection over Union with a frozen DINOv3 encoder.

The paper uses citizen science and deep learning to show that losing threatened bird species will disproportionately reduce avian plumage diversity, especially in tropical regions.

This study evaluates how ancestral state estimation affects disparity analyses, finding that fossil sampling density is more critical than estimation method choice.

The paper shows that the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model in phylogenetic comparative analysis is biased under common conditions and highlights the need for simulation-based validation.