This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: AI optimists will be encouraged by a recent report on the state of the world's plants and fungi by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The report examines the role that digitization and AI are playing in botany and nature management.
Four hundred researchers in 40 countries contributed to the report, including scientists from NTNU. James Speed, a professor of plant ecology at the NTNU University Museum in Trondheim, was one of the contributors to the report. "For hundreds of years, naturalists have collected plants and fungi, pressed and dried them so they could be preserved for the future in herbaria around the world.
In recent years, more and more specimens have been photographed and made available online," Speed explains. "More than 145 million plant and fungi preparations have been digitized worldwide, from more than 170 institutions in 40 countries. This opens up completely new opportunities for research." David Williamson is a postdoctoral researcher in machine learning for natural history at the NTNU University Museum.
Williamson, along with Speed and botanists from the Trondheim herbarium, trained a machine learning model to recognize whether plants are in flower on digitized herbarium specimens. The model was used on 8 million preserved specimens collected from around the world, representing 200,000 species. "What's so exciting is that we're taking collections that have existed for centuries, combining them with machine learning and AI technologies that are barely five years old, and we can then answer big, important questions about nature," Williamson says.
"Machines can't do the work of biologists, but they can help experts analyze datasets that would previously have taken a lifetime," Williamson says. "By way of comparison, the machine here took one week to do something that would have taken a human about 40,000 hours." To put that number in perspective, 40,000 hours equal about 20 working years. "These analyses showed that global flowering times have shifted by an average of 2.5 days per decade over the past century," Speed says.
Flowering has shifted both earlier and later, and the differences are greatest in tropical areas. The greatest temperature increases due to climate change tend to be in the far north, so researchers were surprised to learn that the most dramatic flowering changes were in the tropics. "In the tropics, flowering is more closely related to precipitation, and in a changing climate, the rainy season can come earlier, later—or not at all," Speed explains.
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