The 23rd Congress of AETFAT (Association for the Taxonomy of Tropical African Flora), held at the University of Ghana in Accra, highlighted the growing role of digital tools in the knowledge and promotion of African flora.
Pl@ntNet was strongly represented through several scientific contributions in two major symposia:
In the symposium “New digital tools facilitate botanists’ work”, Murielle Simo-Droissart presented a collective work involving French researchers, as well as research and higher education institutions from Gabon, Congo, Cameroon, Belgium, and the United States. This presentation highlighted the use of Pl@ntNet as a structuring tool to strengthen floristic knowledge in Central Africa. Thanks to artificial intelligence, combined with local botanical expertise, the teams are able to better document a flora that is still very incompletely inventoried, particularly regarding the woody species of dense tropical forests.
In the symposium “Advancement of African floras & new developments in plant identification”, Pierre Bonnet presented the technical and scientific advances related to the use of Pl@ntNet in Africa, notably through the development of an offline identification model designed for contexts with limited connectivity. He showed how this technology helps to better document species distribution and ecosystem dynamics, based on several use cases: contributing to flora management in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya, supporting botanical identification in Central African forests, integrating into university curricula in Madagascar, and assisting in vegetation characterization in desert environments, in connection with anti-locust surveillance activities carried out by CLCPRO.
Pl@ntNet was also present through the GUARDEN project. Indeed, the University of Antananarivo (UNTNR), a central GUARDEN partner, was represented by Mijoro Rakotoarinivo and Rova Andriamamonjy. The latter presented, through a poster and an oral communication, the use of the Pl@ntNet platform to improve the identification and documentation of Madagascar’s unique flora. Thanks to extensive fieldwork carried out within the framework of GUARDEN, more than 8,000 new plant observations have been integrated into Pl@ntNet, covering nearly 2,000 Malagasy species that had previously been underrepresented in the database.
These contributions highlighted the richness of the collaborations built through Pl@ntNet, particularly within international programs such as MAMBO, GUARDEN, OFVI and Pl@ntAgroEco, where researchers, students, conservationists and citizens work together to produce data and knowledge on plant biodiversity. By enabling rapid, accessible and scientifically reliable identification of plant species, Pl@ntNet today stands out as a reference tool for botanical research in Africa, while strengthening the links between science and society.
