Missouri Botanical Garden's RSI project to digitize plant collection

ST. LOUIS - The Missouri Botanical Garden announced the launch of its new Revolutionizing Species Identification Program, or the RSI project, which is a transformative initiative to digitize the Missouri Botanical Garden’s extensive herbarium collection, all while leveraging cutting-edge AI.

“We’re using cutting-edge technology—artificial intelligence—to identify plant species automatically. Normally, the botanist would go in the field and identify the specimens, and the specimens are brought back to the herbarium and would be identified manually. This is still necessary, but using artificial intelligence would speed up the process significantly,” Senior Vice President Science & Conservation Research Gunter Fischer said.

The initiative was made possible by an anonymous $14.4 million grant. This allows the Missouri Botanical Garden to digitize six million specimens over the course of the next six years.

“The information stored in the specimen is highly relevant for conservation because of information for distribution and rarity is important to assess the conservation stages of species,” Fischer added.

The project responds to the urgent global biodiversity crisis, where approximately one-third of the world’s plants are endangered and need saving.

The garden hopes it will grow to potentially something larger in the future.

“The next phase would be to use a similar technology of artificial intelligence for example, to mount the scanners onto drones and then fly over the canopy of forest to be able to identify tree species in the canopy, which would be really revolutionizing conservation as well because you can’t conserve what you don’t know," Fischer said.