Sentinel Beetles: NEON Carabid Specimen Images with Drought Indices

Images of pinned carabid beetle specimens collected by the National Ecological Observatory Network from ecological sites across the U.S. The dataset was developed for the second HDR ML Challenge and includes associated metadata and drought severity indices (Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index). It was authored by imageomics and last updated on Hugging Face in May 2026.

Use Cases

• Training computer vision models to identify beetle species based on pinned specimen imagery.
• Developing predictive models for drought severity based on ecological specimen metadata.
• Analyzing correlations between insect populations and environmental stress indicators like the SPEI.
• Creating multi-modal datasets for biodiversity and climate change research.

Strengths

• Includes imagery from a national-scale ecological observatory network (NEON).
• Combines biological specimen data with standardized environmental indices (SPEI).
• Created for a specific machine learning challenge, suggesting a defined task structure.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file formats are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal biases inherent to the NEON collection sites and periods.

Provenance

Source

National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)

Collection Method

Collection of pinned carabid beetle specimens and associated environmental data.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-22 15:11:03; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Ecological sites across the United States.