Florida Museum of Natural History
Porto Lab
Led by Arthur Porto · Florida Museum of Natural History
What we study
The Porto Lab applies machine learning to biological images and morphology. Recent work classifies electron-microscope images of bryozoans by genus; the PI's papers cover fossil image classification and the evolution of bird and mammal forms.
What working here is like
- Computational
- No organisms (data only)
- Coding required
- Project
- 1
- Papers
- 5
Current projects
Comparative Performance Analysis of Image Classification Algorithms on SEMs of the Bryozoan Order Cheilostomata
The lab applied machine‑learning classifiers to scanning‑electron‑microscope pictures of tiny marine animals to help identify their genus. The student cleaned the dataset to keep only images with a full autozooid, trained several algorithms, and compared how well each could sort the pictures despite limited and imperfect data.
From the Spring 2025 UF Undergraduate Research Symposium · abstract book, p. 216
Summaries are written by AI in plain language from public symposium abstracts and may be imperfect.
Recent papers, explained
- Similarities in Morphological Integration and Evolutionary Potential Across Four Common Foot Forms in Birds
2026 · Evolutionary Biology
Compares how bird foot shapes evolve and work together.
- Invasion of new adaptive zones retains telltale signs of directional selection at macroevolutionary scales in mammals
2026 · Evolution Letters
Checks if animal skull changes show signs of strong selection when moving to new habitats.
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- AI and paleontology: effects of vertebrate fossil sample size on machine learning image classification
2026 · Paleobiology
Tests how well AI classifies shark teeth images with different amounts of data.
- Identifying the Big Questions in paleontology: a community-driven project
2025 · Paleobiology
Lists key questions paleontologists want to answer next.
- Evolvability: progress and key questions
2025 · BioScience
Reviews progress in evolvability research and sets future questions for studying how evolution changes over time.
Plain-language summaries are AI-written and reviewed by us; check the paper for details.
How to reach out
Arthur Porto hasn't set up this page yet. You can also look them up in the UF directory (search “Arthur Porto”).