Dont want to miss the bloom? This L.A. scientist created a poppy forecast
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Imagine waking up early, eager to peep dazzling carpets of brilliant orange flowers at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve.Instagram posts promised a spectacle.You drive to the reserve north of Los Angeles, but the rolling hills aren’t alive with color.Bummer.
The bloom is over.Thanks to AI, and a local scientist, such disappointment may soon be a thing of the past.This year, Steve Klosterman, a biologist who works on natural climate solutions, launched a “wildflower forecast,” powered by a deep-learning model, satellite imagery and weather data.In a sense, Klosterman, of Santa Monica, developed the tool to meet his own need.Last spring, the Midwest transplant was hankering to see some wildflowers.He assumed there was some online resource that offered predictions or leveraged satellite images.“Surely, there must be something,” he recalled thinking.
“But there was nothing.”There are tools.The state reserve operates a live cam trained on one swath of land.
Theodore Payne, a California native plant nursery and education center, runs a wildflower hotline, where people can call in and hear weekly recorded reports on hot spots.“These are all essential resources,” Klosterman said.“At the same time, they’re limited.”Klosterman isn’t green when it comes to plants.
His PhD, at Harvard, focused on the timing of new leaves on trees in the spring and color change in the fall.For a class project, a team he was part of built a website that predicted those leaf changes in the Boston area.It was a hit.
To create the poppy bloom predictor, Klosterman turned to AI initially developed for medical imaging.He has harnessed it to instead analyze satellite images of the Antelope Valley.The model scans 10-by-10-meter squares of land to determine whether poppies are present by their telltale orange color.
(It also identifies tiny yellow flowers called goldfields.)Th...