In late June, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew invited Pl@ntNet to its 2026 Symposium, where Kew unveiled its flagship report State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2026 — to which the Pl@ntNet team actively contributed.

AI for conservation, with its pitfalls

Pierre Bonnet, coordinator of the platform and botanist at CIRAD, represented Pl@ntNet in the closing plenary, Supercharging biodiversity conservation: the powers and pitfalls of AI, alongside Drew Purves (Google DeepMind) and Juhie Radia (Kew Youth Council). The discussion covered what AI can do for digitising natural history collections and using biodiversity data, but also its limits, ethical implications, data governance, access to technology in the Global South and digital sovereignty.

Pl@ntNet was presented as a concrete example of AI supporting conservation at scale: a citizen-science tool relying on several million contributors in more than 200 countries. The platform’s work on automated identification of herbarium specimens and its long-standing collaboration with Dr Sue Han Lee (Swinburne University, Sarawak) on plant pathogen identification were also highlighted by other speakers.

Data quality and interoperability

One message came back throughout the event: data quality. Pl@ntNet’s research on automated data curation, model evaluation standards, large-scale mapping and the interoperability between citizen observations, digitised collections and global taxonomic references is what makes its GBIF datasets usable for science — and much of it relies on the community.

The report also records a milestone for digital biodiversity: more than 145 million plant and fungal specimens digitised in a decade. The 55-page synthesis is available on Kew’s website.

Read the original post on plantnet.org.