Artificial intelligence is slowly being considered the greatest invention of the 21st century, and the reasons are quite promising. AI is being used to find a partner for the loneliest plant in the world. It is trying to help scientists save a nearly extinct plant that is said to be older than the dinosaurs. The use of artificial intelligence in this great discovery is grabbing the headlines now.
The nearly extinct plant, E. woodii, is from the cycad plant family. This plant is also proven to be the oldest existing seed-bearing plant on the face of the earth. E. woodii was found and saved from the Ngoye Forest in South Africa. According to the scientists, the only way to save the plant from going completely extinct is to find a female plant from the same cycad family for reproduction. Scientists are trying to grow the population of the plant shortly. However, in recent years, everyone has failed to find the plant.
Woodii is only found in the Ngoye Forest, and scanning through the vast 10,0000-acre forest land is a challenging task with great chances of failure. Hence, scientists have figured out a faster way to scan the forest to save the plant from going extinct. Recently, a survey of 195 acres of land in the forest was done. A drone was used to click high-resolution pictures of the area, and it produced 15,780 pictures. However, the daunting task is finding the plant by scanning each photograph. Hence, scientists are using artificial intelligence to analyse the photos to find a female plant from the same family. AI is helping to process this huge amount of data.
Dr Laura Cinti, the lead of the project, expressed, “With AI, we are using an image recognition algorithm to recognise plants by shape. We have generated images of plants and put them in different ecological settings to train the model to recognise them.”
The project has just started, and only 2 per cent of the forest was scanned to find the female plant. Dr Cindi said, “I’m confident there is a female out there somewhere; after all, there must have been at one time. It would be wonderful to bring this plant so close to extinction back through natural reproduction.”
The scientists are also thinking of another way to save the plant. They are also exploring the idea of the sex change of the plant. To address the idea, Dr Cinti added, “There have been reports of sex change in other cycad species due to sudden environmental changes such as temperature, so we are hopeful we can induce sex change in E. woodii too.”
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