Christopher R. Cooney

PlumageParts: A fine-grained avian plumage segmentation dataset and benchmark for ecological image analysis

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 avian colourscape is disproportionately threatened by species extinctions

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.

Sexual selection does not predict long-term population trends in birds

The paper examines whether sexual selection predicts population trends in birds using abundance data across 738 species and finds no significant association.