Artificial intelligence identifies plant species for science

Digitizing plant specimens is opening up a whole new world for researchers looking to mine collections from around the world. Computer algorithms trained on the images of thousands of preserved plants have learned to automatically identify species that have been pressed, dried and mounted on herbarium sheets, researchers report. The work, published in BMC Evolutionary Biology on 11 August1, is the first attempt to use deep learning -- an artificial-intelligence technique that teaches neural networks using large, complex data sets -- to tackle the difficult taxonomic task of identifying species in natural-history collections. It's unlikely to be the last attempt, says palaeobotanist Peter Wilf of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "This kind of work is the future; this is where we're going in natural history."