AI reveals hidden traits about our planet's flora to help save species

 In a world-first, scientists from UNSW and Botanic Gardens of Sydney, have trained AI to unlock data from millions of plant specimens kept in herbaria around the world, to study and combat the impacts of climate change on flora.

"Herbarium collections are amazing time capsules of plant specimens," says lead author on the study, Associate Professor Will Cornwell. "Each year over 8000 specimens are added to the National Herbarium of New South Wales alone, so it's not possible to go through things manually anymore."

Using a new machine learning algorithm to process over 3000 leaf samples, the team discovered that contrary to frequently observed interspecies patterns, leaf size doesn't increase in warmer climates within a single species.

Published in the American Journal of Botany, this research not only reveals that factors other than climate have a strong effect on leaf size within a plant species, but demonstrates how AI can be used to transform static specimen collections and to quickly and effectively document climate change effects.

Herbarium collections move to the digital world

Herbaria are scientific libraries of plant specimens that have existed since at least the 16th century.

"Historically, a valuable scientific effort was to go out, collect plants, and then keep them in a herbarium. Every record has a time and a place and a collector and a putative species ID," says A/Prof. Cornwell, a researcher at the School of BEES and a member of UNSW Data Science Hub.

A couple of years ago, to help facilitate scientific collaboration, there was a movement to transfer these collections online.

"The herbarium collections were locked in small boxes in particular places, but the world is very digital now. So to get the information about all of the incredible specimens to the scientists who are now scattered across the world, there was an effort to scan the specimens to produce high resolution digital copies of them."

The largest herbarium imaging project was undertaken at the Botanic Gardens of Sydney when over 1 million plant specimens at the National Herbarium of New South Wales were transformed into high-resolution digital images.

sources:science daily