The rise of AI and digitisation could be a turning point in the “race against extinction” faced by botanists trying to identify and save vital plants before they vanish, according to a major report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
New technology is enabling scientists to track how flowering times have shifted by weeks around the world, rapidly identify new specimens and even get crucial genetic data from 180-year-old fungus specimens, potentially opening a “genomic goldmine”. Digitisation and online access to millions of specimens that were until now only accessible in archives is also producing new insights, especially in the global south.
Plants and fungi underpin all life on Earth, supplying food and medicines, storing carbon and regulating the climate. However, about 40% of the 70,000 plant species that have been assessed are at risk of extinction, while another 330,000 have yet to be analysed. There are also believed to be another 100,000 plant species still to be named by scientists.
Pisolithus madagascariensis, a newly described gasteroid fungus (aka a dyeball, pea stone or dung fungus) endemic to Madagascar, was one of Kew’s ‘top 10 new species of 2024’. Photograph: Bryn DentingerAbout 2,000 new plant species are recorded each year but this “barely scratches the surface” said Prof Alexandre Antonelli, the executive director of science at RBG Kew.
It means potential new medicines and sustainable crops are going extinct before even being discovered.
The situation is even more stark for fungi, with 90% of an estimated 2m species still unknown to science and less than 1% of known species assessed for extinction risk.
“While documenting and protecting all life on Earth remain formidable challenges, digitisation and accompanying technologies make me increasingly hopeful that we’ll succeed,” said Antonelli.
AI can learn how to identify challenging plants, for example, such as sedges and peat mosses whose distinguishing features are microscopic, meaning new or vulnerable species can be spotted faster. “These AI models can sometimes now identify better than specialists – that’s incredibly exciting,” he said.
Russula neopascua ‘fishy’ toadstool fungi from the High Rockies of Colorado and Montana and another of Kew’s ‘top 10 new species of 2024’. Photograph: Chance NoffsingerDigitising images and collection data of plant and fungi specimens also speeds up international collaboration and can open up important but rarely accessed collections in biodiversity hotspots, such as Madagascar.
Landy Rajaovelona, a senior botanist at Kew Madagascar, says: ‘Madagascar is one of the world’s most extraordinary biodiversity hotspots. By digitising [37,000 physical specimens], we’ve unlocked a treasure of knowledge spanning centuries, offering invaluable insights into today’s biodiversity.”
RBG Kew has now digitised all 7.4m of its specimens, including those collected by Charles Darwin, and these are freely available online. The four-year programme involved taking 20,000 high-resolution images a day at its peak. In total, there are 145m digital specimens now online globally, but this is less than 16% of the total held in herbariums, leaving “huge blind spots in understanding”, the scientists said.
The report also features a global study using an AI model trained to spot flowers that analysed 8m digitised specimens. It revealed flowering has shifted by an average 2.5 days a decade over the last century due to the climate crisis. Changing rainfall patterns, as well as rising temperatures, have meant some flowers arriving later and others coming earlier.
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