- Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to find a female partner for an endangered male plant, which is described as the world’s loneliest plant.
- Although there is only one male plant found, no comprehensive exploration has been conducted to determine if a female plant could exist before.
- The species is still grown and propagated at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.
AI is adopted in search of a female partner for an endangered male plant, known as the world’s loneliest, as no thorough investigation has been conducted in the forest in South Africa.
AI: searching for a female counterpart
Led by the University of Southampton, a research project is searching thousands of acres of forest in South Africa, where the only known Encephalartos woodii (E. woodii), an ancient species that predates the dinosaurs and is believed to be among the most endangered organisms on the planet, was ever found. Currently, all of the existing members of the species are male clones of the only known E. woodii, and are unable to naturally reproduce.
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Challenges and hopes
Discovered in the Ngoye Forest in 1895, the E. woodie, which is still grown propagated at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in London, has found no female partner to this day, and all subsequent propagated samples are male clones. However, no comprehensive exploration has been conducted to determine if a female plant could exist. “With the AI, we are using an image recognition algorithm in order to recognise plants by shape”, said Dr. Ciniti, research fellow at the University of Southampton, “We generated images of plants and put them in different ecological settings, to train the model to recognise them.”
