Invasive plant identification (BeOpen)

2023 m. Vilnius Plan represents Vilnius, Lithuania and Northern Europe in the international project
“BeOpen”, which was launched at the beginning of the year by the European Union (EU).The company represents Vilnius, Lithuania and Northern Europe in
invasive plant detection and forecasting.
The BeOpen project involves a total of 18 partners from Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Lithuania,
Portugal. The project will address a wide range of issues affecting eight European cities,
including Vilnius, such as mobility, urban safety, environmental protection,
natural disasters, traffic pollution, air quality, invasive species.
It is the first of its kind, bringing together 18 different companies from 6 different countries to develop
technologies that address a wide range of problems, make them accessible to everyone in the European
Union, scalable to different cities or countries, and open up the collected
data to the public. The technologies developed and the experience gained during the project will be shared
among all participants, which is an excellent opportunity to learn about good practices in other countries.
Vilnius has chosen to participate in the project to address the problem of invasive plant spread, in particular
Sosnovsky blight. Information on invasive plants is being collected in the capital, and
the city council will analyse this information to decide how to eradicate them more effectively, and
share its experience with other EU countries.
Artificial intelligence will be used to detect invasive plants. To train it, it will first
collect and organise data on the locations where these invasive plants are known to be growing today, and their
areas.
By analysing this information, the AI will learn to distinguish between what Sosnowski’s bark beetles
look like, and will then be able to detect them or individual plants itself. All collected and processed data will be
made available to the public so that residents can assess the situation of these plants in their
living environment and the likelihood that invasive plants could appear on their land.