AI Offering Fertile Ground for Biodiversity Informatics NVIDIA Blog

For centuries, scientists have assembled and maintained extensive information on plants and stored it in what are known as herbaria -- vast numbers of cabinets and drawers – at natural history museums and research institutions across the globe. They've used them to discover and confirm the identity of organisms and catalog their characteristics. Over the past two decades, much of this data has been digitized, and this treasure of text, imagery and samples has become easier to share around the world. Now, complementary projects at the Smithsonian Institution in the U.S. and the Costa Rica Institute of Technology (ITCR) are tapping the combination of big data analytics, computer vision and GPUs to deepen science's access -- and understanding -- of botanical information. Their use of GPU-accelerated deep learning promises to hasten the work of researchers, who discover and describe about 2,000 species of plants each year, and need to compare them against the nearly 400,000 known species.