Nearly Half of the World’s Flowering Plants Face the Threat of Extinction, Study Says

A new study estimates that nearly half of the world’s known flowering plants are threatened.

A less colorful world looms on our horizon. Almost half of the world’s flowers are in danger of extinction, according to a recent preprint posted on biorxiv.org.

A group of scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in Richmond, U.K., built a model that uses artificial intelligence, or AI, to guess whether a plant species is threatened. Their goal was to promote more plants to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which tracks the extinction risks for plants and animals and is an important channel for conservation funding.

“We’re trying to raise the profile because we feel plants often get missed in the conversation about more furry and fluffy things,” said botanist Steven Bachman, the study’s lead author. Bachman’s team hopes to expand representation of the oft-overlooked kingdom on the influential list.

Right now, there are too many plants and not enough researchers studying them. The IUCN has considered only 18% of all plant species for an entry on the Red List so far, the authors note. So Bachman’s team decided to enlist a nonhuman helper. They showed all the plants that the Red List has evaluated to the AI, and they taught it to recognize the ones that are under threat by noticing certain qualities shared by those species.