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.
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
Read more at: University of New South Wales
