Overview
Botanic gardens collectively hold more than 100,000 plant species, including many threatened with extinction. They also hold extensive data about their collections, but turning those records into decisions about conservation and collections management requires specialist analytical expertise that many gardens do not have.
BGsmartR Curator will develop a conversational interface for BGsmartR, an existing open-source tool for analysing living-collection data. Curators will be able to ask questions about their collections in everyday language—for example, which threatened plants may be most vulnerable to loss, where a collection is particularly important globally, or how it may need to adapt to climate change. The underlying analysis will be carried out using BGsmartR’s tested tools, with AI helping users interrogate and interpret the results. The prototype will be co-designed and tested with botanic gardens internationally, with the aim of making sophisticated collections analysis accessible to institutions without dedicated data expertise.
Project lead:
Samuel Brockington, Department of Plant Sciences
