Climate change is making it increasingly important to know how plants can survive and thrive in a changing environment. Conventional experiments in the lab have shown that plants accumulate pigments in response to environmental factors. To date, such measurements were made by taking samples, which required a part of the plant to be removed and thus damaged. This labor-intensive method isn\u2019t viable when thousands or millions of samples are needed. Moreover, taking repeated samples damages the plants, which in turn affects observations of how plants respond to environmental factors. There hasn\u2019t been a suitable method for the long-term observation of individual plants within an ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A team of researchers at the University of Zurich has now developed a method that enables scientists to observe plants in nature with great precision, says the university in a press release<\/a>. PlantServation is a method that incorporates robust image-acquisition hardware and deep learning-based software to analyze field images, and it works in any kind of weather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Using PlantServation, the researchers collected (top-view) images of Arabidopsis plants across three field seasons (lasting five months from fall to spring) and then analyzed the more than four million images using machine learning. The data recorded the species-specific accumulation of a plant pigment called \u201canthocyanin\u201d as a response to seasonal and annual fluctuations in temperature, light intensity and precipitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PlantServation also enabled the scientists to experimentally replicate what happens after the natural speciation of a hybrid polyploid species. These species develop from a duplication of the entire genome of their ancestors, a common type of species diversification in plants. Many wild and cultivated plants such as wheat and coffee originated in this way.<\/p>\n\n\n In the current study, the anthocyanin content of the hybrid polyploid species A. kamchatica resembled that of its two ancestors: from fall to winter its anthocyanin content was similar to that of the ancestor species originating from a warm region, and from winter to spring it resembled the other species from a colder region. \u201cThe results of the study thus confirm that these hybrid polyploids combine the environmental responses of their progenitors, which supports a long-standing hypothesis about the evolution of polyploids,\u201d says Rie Shimizu-Inatsugi, one of the study\u2019s two corresponding authors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PlantServation was developed in the experimental garden at UZH\u2019s Irchel Campus. \u201cIt was crucial for us to be able to use the garden on Irchel Campus to develop PlantServation\u2019s hardware and software, but its application goes even further: when combined with solar power, its hardware can be used even in remote sites. With its economical and robust hardware and open-source software, PlantServation paves the way for many more future biodiversity studies that use AI to investigate plants other than Arabidopsis \u2013 from crops such as wheat to wild plants that play a key role for the environment,\u201d says Kentaro Shimizu, corresponding author and co-director of the URPP Evolution in Action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Climate change is making it increasingly important to know how plants can survive and thrive in a changing environment. Conventional experiments in the lab have shown that plants accumulate pigments in response to environmental factors. To date, such measurements were made by taking samples, which required a part of the plant to be removed and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2589,"featured_media":494398,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8553],"tags":[10373,69735,81153,76320,37526,81156],"location":[52892],"article_type":[36684],"serie":[],"archives":[],"internal_archives":[],"reboot-archive":[],"class_list":["post-459157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital","tag-ai","tag-ai-nl-3","tag-artificial-intelligence-31","tag-kunstmatige-intelligentie-2","tag-planten","tag-university-of-zurich-3","location-switzerland","article_type-news"],"blocksy_meta":[],"acf":{"subtitle":"A team of researchers at the University of Zurich has now developed a method that enables scientists to observe plants in nature with great precision.","text_display_homepage":false},"author_meta":{"display_name":"Team IO","author_link":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/author\/erikdevries\/"},"featured_img":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/ai-in-plant-science-article.jpg","coauthors":[],"tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["Digital<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Digital<\/span>"]},"tags":{"linked":["AI<\/a>","AI<\/a>","artificial intelligence<\/a>","kunstmatige intelligentie<\/a>","planten<\/a>","University of Zurich<\/a>"],"unlinked":["AI<\/span>","AI<\/span>","artificial intelligence<\/span>","kunstmatige intelligentie<\/span>","planten<\/span>","University of Zurich<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":"0","relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 3 years ago","modified":"Updated 3 years ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on September 25, 2023","modified":"Updated on September 25, 2023"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on September 25, 2023 10:29 am","modified":"Updated on September 25, 2023 10:29 am"},"featured_img_caption":"","series_order":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459157"},{"taxonomy":"location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/location?post=459157"},{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=459157"},{"taxonomy":"serie","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/serie?post=459157"},{"taxonomy":"archives","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/archives?post=459157"},{"taxonomy":"internal_archives","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/internal_archives?post=459157"},{"taxonomy":"reboot-archive","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ioplus.nl\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/reboot-archive?post=459157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Millions of images<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Far-flung regions<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n