My talk will be about all the projects I am working on in my PhD project. I will explore how innovative methods can help to improve the identification of pollen. This enables improved hay fever forecasts and helps to unravel the hidden biodiversity of pollen.
Hay fever is an increasing problem and it is estimated that 1 in 5 people suffer from its effects. The exact species composition of pollen in the air is often unknown. I therefore explore new and more efficient ways of identifying pollen for my PhD project within the Marie Curie ETN Plant.ID at Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Oslo University. I use automatic image recognition to relieve the time-consuming task of pollen specialists. DNA metabarcoding further aids in species recognition of plant groups that have highly similar pollen.