TerraIncognita: A Dynamic Benchmark for Species Discovery Using Frontier Models

Project Page | GitHub | Paper

Description

TerraIncognita is a curated benchmark for evaluating open-world insect classification and biodiversity discovery. It includes labeled images of both Known species and Novel (unseen) insect specimens collected from underexplored biodiversity-rich regions.

The benchmark includes:

• Expert-reviewed taxonomic labels at multiple levels: Order, Family, Genus, and Species
• Clean metadata split into Known and Novel subsets

Benchmark Structure

TerraIncognita contains:

• Known Species Set: 200 expertly labeled images from 100 insect species. Each species has 2 images with ground truth labels embedded in the metadata.
• Novel Species Set: Specimens from unknown or less-documented species. These include partial taxonomic labels (often up to Family or Genus) and were reviewed by an expert entomologist.

File Structure

terra_incognita_benchmark/
├── Known/
│   ├── 00001/
│   ├── ...
├── Novel/
│   ├── 00001/
│   ├── ...
├── metadata.csv
├── metadata_known.csv
├── metadata_novel.csv
├── croissant.json

Acknowledgements

This benchmark was created by:

• Shivani Chiranjeevi, Hossein Zaremehrjerdi, Zi K. Deng, Talukder Z. Jubery, Ari Grele, Arti Singh, Asheesh K Singh, Soumik Sarkar, Nirav Merchant, Harold F. Greeney, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, and Chinmay Hegde.

This work was supported in part by the AI Research Institutes program supported by the NSF and USDA-NIFA under the AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture (Award No. 2021-67021-35329).

License

This dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

You are free to:

• Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
• Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:

• Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

Please cite our work when using this dataset in your research.

Responsible Use Disclaimer

This dataset includes images of insects, including potentially undescribed species, photographed in biodiversity-rich regions. This dataset contains images of insects collected using light-trap photography. While all images were without specimen collection, users are strictly discouraged from using this dataset to aid in illegal collection, poaching, habitat disturbance, or any other activity that could harm vulnerable ecosystems. To reduce risk of misuse, all sensitive geolocation metadata has been removed. Please do not attempt to extract or reconstruct location metadata.

Users are strictly discouraged from using this dataset for:

• illegal collection, poaching or specimen trade,
• targeting habitats of rare or undescribed species,
• or any action that could negatively impact biodiversity in vulnerable ecosystems.

This dataset is released solely for scientific research and educational purposes, aligned with principles of biodiversity conservation and environmental responsibility.

Citation

If you use TerraIncognita in your research, please cite:

@inproceedings{chiranjeevi2025terraincognita,
  title={TerraIncognita: A Dynamic Benchmark for Species Discovery Using Frontier Models},
  author={Chiranjeevi, Shivani and Zaremehrjerdi, Hossein and Deng, Zi K. and Jubery, Talukder Z. and Grele, Ari and Singh, Arti and Singh, Asheesh K. and Sarkar, Soumik and Merchant, Nirav and Greeney, Harold F. and Ganapathysubramanian, Baskar and Hegde, Chinmay},
  booktitle={},
  year={2025}
}

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