If you feel guilty about relying on technology to improve your love life, rest assured that at least you’re not using drones and artificial intelligence (AI) to find a partner. This is precisely what Encephalartos woodii, one of the loneliest plant species in the world, is having to do in an effort to avoid extinction.
E. woodii is a member of the Cycad family, the oldest seed plants still existing on Earth – they even appeared before the age of dinosaurs. Unfortunately, this species has become extinct in the wild, with the last known individual discovered in the Ngoye Forest in South Africa in 1895.
This species has not completely gone extinct thanks to continuous breeding in botanical gardens. However, since the last individual of E. woodii found in the wild was male, this means that all remaining individuals of this species are also male.
The last individual of this plant species was discovered in the Ngoye Forest in South Africa in 1895.
Scientists hope to restore the population of this species through natural reproduction. However, the problem that has arisen is that no one has found a female plant. To assist E. woodii, a research team has utilized drones to explore the Ngoye Forest, an area that has never been fully explored before, in an effort to find a female partner.
These drones are equipped with multispectral cameras capable of capturing light from five different wavelength bands, each band helping to identify plant species and their characteristics. However, with 40.47 hectares of forest to survey, a recent investigation of just 0.79 hectares resulted in 15,780 images.
This is a massive amount of imagery that needs to be analyzed, so the team has employed artificial intelligence to process them. “We use an image recognition algorithm in AI to identify plant species based on their shapes,” explained Dr. Laura Cinti, the project leader. “We created images of the plants and placed them in different ecological environments to train the identification model.”
If this method does not locate a female plant – and so far, they have not found one despite surveying less than 2% of the forest – researchers are considering 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 hope to stimulate a sex change in E. woodii,” Dr. Cinti stated.
After 300 million years of existence on this planet, Cycads are now considered one of the most endangered organisms; bringing E. woodii back from the brink of extinction would be a significant achievement. “I find inspiration in the story of E. woodii; it reflects a typical unrequited love story,” Dr. Cinti said. “I hope there is a female plant out there, one that once existed. It would be wonderful to bring this plant species back from the brink of extinction through natural reproduction.”
