Drones are scouring a South African forest for a very specific type of plant

Thanks to AI, the endangered Encephalartos woodie plant may one day thrive again. British scientists have deployed drones equipped with reconnaissance sensors in a South African forest in the hope of finding a female partner for this critically endangered male plant species.

Belonging to the cycad family, Encephalartos woodii – also known as E. woodii or Wood’s cycad – is one of the oldest surviving seed-bearing plants. Similar to a palm tree, this plant has been present on Earth for over 300 million years, but it is now threatened with extinction.

The only surviving specimen is a male plant discovered in South Africa’s Ngoye Forest. Without a female, it can no longer reproduce naturally.

To ensure its survival, scientists from the University of Southampton (UK) set out in search of a female specimen of E. woodii.

For the past two years, they have been sending out drones equipped with reconnaissance sensors to explore the Ngoye Forest, in search of a female partner for the plant.

The first flights took tens of thousands of images and used a multispectral sensor to capture features beyond what can be seen by the naked eye, for example, to tell whether plants are alive or dead.

But the technology goes even further, since the algorithm, based on artificial intelligence, can distinguish plants by their shape and thus identify species.

“We generated images of plants and put them in different ecological settings, to train the model to recognize them,” explains Dr Laura Cinti, a research fellow at the University of Southampton, who is leading the project.

Synthetic images and data created using a generative model are used to create maps and visualisations of cycads in the research area.

So far, a female E. woodii has not yet been found. Of the 10,000 acres (approx. 4050 hectares) of Ngoye forest, only 195 (approx. 79 hectares) have been explored. Cinti is therefore continuing her research, while working on another project in parallel also aimed at preserving the E. woodii.

This involves modifying the plant’s sex, through chemical or physiological manipulation, and then generating vegetative plants from that material.

“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,” the researcher says. – AFP Relaxnews