AI Offering Fertile Ground for Biodiversity Informatics

Researchers at Smithsonian Institution, Costa Rica Institute of Technology are using GPU deep learning to speed up and deepen science’s understanding of plant biodiversity. 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.