If you’ve ever felt bad about leaning on a bit of tech to help your love life, rest assured – at least you’re not having to use drones and artificial intelligence (AI) to find a partner (at least we hope not). That’s what Encephalartos woodii, quite possibly the world’s loneliest plant, is having to do to try and bring the species back from the brink of extinction.
E. woodii is a member of the cycads, the oldest surviving seed-bearing plants on Earth – they even pre-date the dinosaurs. Unfortunately, this particular species has also met its extinction in the wild, with the last remaining specimen found in the Ngoye Forest, South Africa in 1895.
It’s managed not to go completely extinct because of continued propagation in botanical gardens, though because the last wild specimen of E. woodii was male, this means that the remaining members of the species are also all males.
Scientists would like to build up the population again through natural reproduction, but therein lies a problem: no one’s ever found a female plant. To give E. woodii a helping hand, a team of researchers have taken to combing the Ngoye Forest, which has never been fully explored before, with drones in an attempt to find a female partner.
The drones feature a multispectral camera capable of capturing light from five different wavelength bands, each of which can help to distinguish particular plants and their features. However, there are 10,000 acres of the forest to search and a recent survey of just 195 of those generated 15,780 images.
That’s a lot of pictures to go through, so the team have been analyzing them with AI.
“With the AI, we are using an image recognition algorithm in order to recognise plants by shape,” explained Dr Laura Cinti, who is leading the project, in a statement. “We generated images of plants and put them in different ecological settings, to train the model to recognise them.”
If a female plant isn’t located with this approach – they haven’t found one yet, although less than 2 percent of the forest has been searched – researchers are currently exploring the possibility of changing the sex of a male plant.
“There have been reports of sex change in other cycad species due to sudden environmental changes such as temperature, so we are hopeful we can induce sex change in the E. woodii too,” said Dr Cinti.
After 300 million years on the planet, cycads are now believed to be one of its most endangered organisms; bringing E. woodii back from the brink of extinction would be quite the achievement.
“I was very inspired by the story of the E. woodii, it mirrors a classic tale of unrequited love,” said Dr Cinti. “I’m hopeful there is a female out there somewhere, after all there must have been at one time. It would be amazing to bring this plant so close to extinction back through natural reproduction.”
