AI could help win 'race against extinction' of vital plants, say botanists

A major report from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, finds that AI and digitisation tools are enabling botanists to identify new plant specimens more rapidly, track shifts in flowering times, and extract genetic data from specimens up to 180 years old. The framing of a race against extinction is not hyperbole here — the pace of biodiversity loss has outstripped traditional cataloguing capacity for decades. The report suggests that applied AI in conservation science may be one domain where the technology's benefits are both meaningful and relatively uncontested.