Kew completes digitisation of 7.4 million specimens as AI reshapes biodiversity science

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has finished digitising all 7.4 million plant and fungal specimens in its collections and, on 16 June 2026, published the sixth “State of the World’s Plants and Fungi” report, which argues that biodiversity digitisation and artificial intelligence are changing the effort to prevent extinctions. The report draws on more than 400 scientists across 40 countries and was released with 52 peer-reviewed papers in the journals “Plants People Planet” and “New Phytologist.”

The central message is twofold: the scale of the biodiversity crisis has been underestimated, and rapid advances in data and technology now offer a faster way to map and protect what remains. “The potential for AI is enormous, but it is still currently potential,” said Martin Cheek, a senior research leader at Kew, in the report’s account of where the tools stand today.

Inside the digitisation project

The four-year project used four high-resolution cameras, operated by 100 staff and 42 volunteers, to image every herbarium and fungarium specimen, capturing each pressed sample and the labels that record where, when and by whom it was collected. It cost £15 million, funded principally by the UK government through the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and the images are now free to access through Kew’s Data Portal and searchable via the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. “In this four-year project, every cupboard and every box has been opened,” said Kew botanist Sarah Phillips, who led the work, in Nature’s report on the digitisation.

Source: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Nature, 15 June 2026.

What biodiversity digitisation is unlocking

Digitising specimens lets researchers compare material remotely, correct misidentifications and find species hidden in old collections. In Costa Rica, scientists raised the country’s known fungal diversity by nearly 20% by combining published records with digitised collections. AI can be trained to identify hard groups such as sedges and peat mosses, whose distinguishing features are microscopic, helping taxonomists flag specimens that may be new to science. In the Republic of Congo, smartphone images of an unusual peatland plant, sent to Kew, pointed to a possible new species in the genus Sabicea. The report frames technology as a potential ally for nature — a theme explored in earlier Winss Solutions coverage of whether AI and sustainability are a match made in heaven.

The true scale of extinction has been underestimated

The report classifies 29,748 plant species and 411 fungal species as threatened with extinction, yet only a fraction of known species have been assessed: 18% of plants and 0.6% of fungi. Fewer than 1,000 plant species have been formally declared extinct, but the report concludes the real figure is likely far higher.

The gaps in basic knowledge are wider still. About 400,000 plant species have been scientifically described, with perhaps 100,000 more awaiting discovery, according to Nature’s account of the report; for fungi, roughly 205,000 species are classified, but more than two million may exist, and less than 10% have been described. More than 4,600 plant and 7,800 fungal species were named as new to science in 2024 and 2025, among them Purpureocillium atlanticum, a fungus found in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest erupting from a trapdoor spider it had infected. Naming remains slow: the ghost palm of Borneo, Plectocomiopsis hantu, was described 92 years after it was first collected. “Taxonomy is now effectively in a race against extinction,” the report states.

Climate change is shifting the timing of flowering

Using AI to analyse eight million digitised herbarium specimens, scientists produced the first comprehensive global study of flowering time, finding that flowering has shifted by an average of 2.5 days per decade over the past century. The changes are uneven — earlier in some regions, later in others — and are driven by rainfall as well as temperature, disrupting long-standing relationships between plants and pollinators.

Closing a 400-year data gap

The report warns that uneven data still limits global action. Fewer than 16% of the world’s herbarium specimens have been imaged and shared digitally, with the largest gaps in the Global South. In Honduras, digitised records revealed that about 33% of the species recorded from protected areas were missing from conservation management plans. Targeted investment can narrow the gap: the Today’s Flora for Tomorrow project has digitised 37,000 specimens from Madagascar, and the average distance between where a holotype was collected and where it is stored has fallen 70%, from nearly 9,000 km at the start of the 19th century to 2,654 km at the start of the 21st. The UK has begun a ten-year, £155.6 million programme, DISSCO-UK, to bring other British collections online; research cited by Nature estimates digitising the country’s natural-history collections could add up to £2 billion to the economy.

Scientists are also recovering high-quality genomes from specimens up to 180 years old, opening historical fungaria to the search for new medicines and crop protection. Kew and UK partners are now building what they describe as the world’s largest fungal genome library, aiming to sequence thousands of species, many rare or never before sampled for DNA. The report stresses that data-sharing must be equitable, warning that AI “could amplify existing errors, biases and inequalities” if the underlying records are not improved.

About the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in southwest London, is a scientific institution and UNESCO World Heritage Site that holds one of the world’s largest collections of plant and fungal specimens and runs the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst. It published the first “State of the World’s Plants” report in 2016 and has since expanded the series to cover fungi, tracking what is known, threatened and still undescribed across both kingdoms. Kew has been an early adopter of digitisation, and the completion of its 7.4 million-specimen scan — released with the 2026 report and its 52 accompanying papers — turns a century of pressed and labelled collections into an open dataset that, the institution argues, can speed the naming of species and the race to prevent their loss.

Sources: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (EurekAlert); Nature News; New Phytologist / Plants People Planet

Featured image: photo by Abdul Kayum on Pexels (free Pexels license).

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Figen Sekin

I specialize in sustainability education, curriculum co-creation, and early-stage project strategy. At WINSS, I craft articles on sustainability, transformative AI, and related topics. When I’m not writing, you’ll find me chasing the perfect sushi roll, exploring cities around the globe, or unwinding with my dog Puffy — the world’s most loyal sidekick.