Digital specimens from one of the world’s largest collections of plants and fungi are made freely available to researchers around the world.
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in southwest London, announced on June 16 that they had completed the digitization of 7.4 million specimens. The project, which used four high-resolution cameras operated by 100 staff and 42 volunteers, cost £15 million ($20 million) and was funded by the British government..
On the same day, Kew also released its 2026 State of the world’s plants and fungi report, highlighting how digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the science of plants and fungi.
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Kew is making its full digital collection available on its website, which will also be viewable via the Global Biodiversity Information Centera portal to natural history collections around the world. Kew’s executive director of science, Alexandre Antonelli, says the digitization project will help democratize access to its resources by making them available to researchers around the world.
“During this four-year project, every cupboard and box was opened,” says Kew botanist Sarah Phillips, who led the digitization project. Digital images capture not only the pressed specimens, but also the labels containing crucial information about where, when and by whom they were collected.
Although Kew and the Natural History Museum in London were relatively early adopters of digitization, millions of botanical, mycological and zoological samples remain underutilized in dozens of smaller institutions across the UK. The UK government recently launched a ten-year, £155.6 million project called the Distributed System of Scientific Collections UK (DISSCO-UK) to help these collections also go online.
Research by economist Helen Hardy, then at the Natural History Museum, found that digitizing natural history collections could bring up to £2 billion to the UK economy. “We are at a moment where digitalization is more effective and efficient than before,” says Hardy.
Abyss of Extinction
THE State of the world’s plants and fungi was revealed with 52 peer-reviewed articles published in journals Plants People Planet And New plant scientist.
According to the report, 400,000 plant species have been scientifically described and there may be 100,000 more to be discovered.
Among the species known to science, 29,748 are classified as being in danger of extinction. Fewer than 1,000 species have been officially declared extinct, but the real number could be much higher, the report concludes. Fungi are sometimes described as the “dark matter” of biology: there are around 205,000 classified species, but there could be millions more, Kew chief mycologist Ester Gaya said at a briefing for journalists on June 15.
In the three years between 2020 and 2023, some 18,000 new plants and fungi were described, according to the previous report. State of the world’s plants and fungi report. But the report also reveals that the majority of these new discoveries also pose a higher level of extinction risk. “Taxonomy is now effectively in a race against extinction,” according to a statement from Kew.
Among the developments highlighted in the latest report is the reversal of practices initiated during the centuries of colonial rule. While countries in Europe or North America once held most herbarium-type specimens — those that biologists use to scientifically describe a plant for the first time — the majority are now found in the countries or regions where they were discovered, according to the report.
AI to the rescue!
The report also highlights how invaluable AI tools have become, both in the field and in museums around the world. Image recognition, in particular, can speed the identification of a species – or determine whether the species is new to science – and determine whether its range and populations are declining or shifting geographically.
“We can use digital assets, AI and other technologies to exploit the information contained in specimens that have been here for centuries,” Antonelli said during the briefing for journalists.
Kew also says that “digitization and mathematical models can significantly help speed up the designation of new species and assessments of extinctions.”
“It’s 250 years of material with different forms of handwriting, and it’s very inconsistent,” says Kew botanist Alan Paton. AI could now play a key role in extracting more information from scans of often handwritten labels.
This article is reproduced with permission and has been published for the first time June 15, 2026.
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