Artificial Intelligence

Report: AI Reveals 30,000 Plant Species Face Extinction

Is AI the key to saving endangered species or is it secretly accelerating their extinction?

Published JUN 17

Report: AI Reveals 30,000 Plant Species Face Extinction

Story

Above: Bluebells in Bucknell Wood woodland, U.K., on May 5. Image credit: Mike Kemp/In Pictures/Getty Images

The Facts

A report by London's Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, released Tuesday, highlights how AI and digitization are transforming efforts to identify and protect plant and fungi species. It draws on work by over 400 scientists across 40 countries.
Independent
EurekAlert!
The report estimates that 29,748 plant species and 411 fungi species face extinction, yet only 18% of plants and 0.6% of fungi have been assessed for extinction risk, while over 100,000 plant and 2 million fungal species remain unknown to science.
Mirage News
The Ethicalist
Part of the study analyzing 8 million digitized herbarium specimens also found that flowering times have shifted by an average of 2.5 days a decade over the past century, driven by changing temperatures and rainfall patterns.
PHYS
Guardian
standard.co.uk
This comes after Kew completed a four-year, £15 million project to digitize all 7.4 million herbarium and fungarium specimens in its collections. During the project it recorded up to 20,000 high-resolution images a day, including specimens gathered by Charles Darwin.
The Times (UK)
Nature
Fewer than 16% of the world's herbarium specimens have been digitized and made available online, leaving significant gaps in biodiversity data, particularly across the Global South.
PHYS
RTE.ie

Sources Split

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CRIT

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ESTAB

The Spin

Narrative A

AI's explosive growth is actively destroying the natural world it claims to help save — data centers, energy consumption and mineral extraction are gutting habitats while fish, plants and amphibians keep vanishing. The technology also hands poachers and illegal collectors the same powerful tools conservationists rely on. No machine can replace the cultural and ethical judgment needed to actually protect endangered species.

Ben See on X

Cincinnati Zoo

Narrative B

AI is transforming conservation in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago. Google's genomics work has already sequenced 13 endangered species, with 150 more on the way, and all that data is free for conservationists worldwide. The kakapo population has roughly doubled since genome sequencing began. Dismissing AI as purely destructive ignores a revolution that could pull countless species back from extinction.