< img alt="Aerial image of tree tops"src="https://www.southampton.ac.uk/img/comms/news/Drone%20footage%202_web.jpg"/ > Drone video footage of the tree
canopy in the Ngoye Forest
. Credit: C-LAB Searching with drones Dr Laura Cinti, research study fellow at the University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art, is leading the first task to use drones and AI to search for a female E. woodii . She said: “This plant is, as far as we know, extinct in the wild. I was extremely influenced by the story of the E. woodii , it mirrors a timeless tale of unrequited love. I’m confident there is a female out there someplace, after all there need to have been at one time. It would be amazing to bring this plant so near to extinction back through natural reproduction.”
Dr Cinti is collaborating with Dr Howard Boland, a creative technology expert operating in AI, and Dr Debbie Jewitt, a preservation scientist and drone pilot based in South Africa.
Initial drone flights in 2022 took tens of countless images and used a multispectral sensor to capture features beyond what can be seen from high above with the naked eye– such as differentiating whether plants are living or dead, and to recognize species.
Aerial image with multispectral noticing. Credit: C-LAB
However with no E. woodii yet found, the drone imaging is ongoing– now with the power of AI. They have covered 195 acres of the Ngoye Forest so far– and there are 10,000 acres in overall.
“With the AI, we are utilizing an image recognition algorithm in order to recognise plants by shape,” described Dr Cinti. “We generated images of plants and put them in various ecological settings, to train the model to acknowledge them.”
Dr Cinti is likewise working on a new partner task investigating whether it is possible to alter the sex of the E. woodii utilizing either chemical or physiological manipulation, and after that generate vegetative plants from that material.
She stated: “There have actually been reports of sex change in other cycad types due to unexpected environmental modifications such as temperature level, so we are hopeful we can cause sex modification in the E. woodii too.”
The last 2 E. woodii at Ngoye Forest in the early 1900s
The story of the E. woodii
The Encephalartos woodii is a type of plant called a cycad. Cycads are the earliest enduring seed-bearing plants, going back more than 300 million years and surviving several mass terminations and environmental modifications.
They are dioecious, which means they are either male or female, and they produce cones from which pollen is transferred by insects for reproduction.
In spite of their durability, they are now the most endangered organisms on our world, and the Encephalartos woodii is the rarest of all.
Dr Cinti said: “Cycads offer on the black market for numerous countless pounds, and are kept in cages in botanical gardens due to the danger of theft.”
More details is offered on the job site.