📝 Digital Botany to Protect Plants 🧵 https://doi.org/n7gq A combination of modern methods and indigenous knowledge could help conserve endangered plants. #Botany #PlantScience 🧪 #InBrief Around the world herbaria hold records of past botanical fieldwork. - ThreadSky

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botany.one • 4 days ago

📝 Digital Botany to Protect Plants 🧵
https://doi.org/n7gq

A combination of modern methods and indigenous knowledge could help conserve endangered plants.
#Botany #PlantScience 🧪 #InBrief

Around the world herbaria hold records of past botanical fieldwork.

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botany.one•4 days ago

Botanists have come back from their travels with preserved plant tissues for centuries. Yet, rather than gathering dust as relics of past botanical expeditions, these collections – from Victorian-era wildflowers to Depression-era crops – are proving essential for modern research questions.

botany.one•4 days ago

In his Tansley Review, Barnabas Daru argues preserved plants, paired with artificial intelligence, could help solve one of biology's most pressing mysteries: how Earth's botanical life will weather a warming world.

botany.one•4 days ago

As climate shifts and cities expand, modern botanists are turning to these historical collections to understand how plants are adapting – or failing to adapt – to our rapidly changing world. Dates on specimens may reveal shifting periods of plant behaviour.

botany.one•4 days ago

But changes need not be obvious to human eyes. Daru says that the value of herbaria could be unlocked, if we look at them through computerised eyes.

Computer Vision combines digital images of plant specimens with machine learning algorithms. It can be systematic, accurate and fast.

botany.one•4 days ago

A project measuring changes in leaf size and shape that could take botanists years of measurement can now be accomplished in days. Being able to track small changes over large samples transforms the plants into a vast database of ecological change, enabling rapid answers to questions.

botany.one•4 days ago

That speed matters, as botanists are up against a deadline.

Habitats are changing or vanishing, as the planet warms, meaning some plants are in critical need of conservation help. But which plants?

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