As the majority of us look to 2021 and hope for a better year, it’s easy to look back at 2020 and only remember what went wrong. But it’s also important to focus on our achievements and use them as a launch pad for further success.
In 2020 we were able to successfully pilot our project capturing high resolution imagery of roadside vegetation and processing the imagery using AI. If you haven’t already, you can read about that project here: First Run of Camera System for Collecting Plant Imagery
After completing our first set of survey runs capturing imagery of invasive plant species, our project was noticed by several news sites and was eventually picked up by ITV for a segment on their National News programme! You can watch our CEO Amjad Karim giving an interview on our project in the clip above.
Our project was covered together with Plant Alert, a citizen science project which aims to help gardeners identify which plants may eventually go on to cause problems for surrounding ecosystems if they were to find their way out of the gardens.
Plants like Himalayan Balsam, one of our target species, were originally introduced to the UK as ornamental plants for gardens, but have since escaped to our countrysides.
We’ve always been aware that tackling the problem of plant conservation will take a collective effort so it was interesting to see another project focussing on preserving our native habitats.
You can read more about what Amjad was speaking about here: https://www.keen-ai.com/post/ash-invasive-species-survey-first-run
