The extinction risk of more than 300,000 plants has been predicted for a new study published today.

A team of scientists at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew have used artificial intelligence to predict the risk for every known flowering plant, totalling 328,565 species.

The research, published in the New Phytologist journal, can be used by scientists “to prioritise and accelerate extinction assessments for the plants we’ve identified as probably threatened but haven’t been officially assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List yet,” says Dr Steven Bachman, research leader in RBG Kew’s Conservation Assessment and Analysis team and author of the study.

On a smaller scale, Bachman says they hope these predictions can be applied to people’s own gardens or their local park to discover whether there is a threatened species that needs protecting.  The predictions for all plants are available via an online portal for anyone to access.

More than 53,000 plants had already been assessed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. The scientists used a Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) model trained on this dataset to determine the likely status of the remaining 275,004 unassessed species.

“We currently lack formal assessments for most plant species and every quiet loss of a species jeopardises our ability to respond to future challenges. Our comprehensive coverage of assessments for all flowering plants raises awareness of each individual species, but especially of those species that we predict to be threatened,” says Bachman.