A vast paper trail of plants and fungi has gone online.
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in southwest London said on 16 June it had finished digitising 7.4 million specimens and is making the full digital collection available free of charge to researchers worldwide.
Kew said the collection will be available on its website and searchable through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a portal to natural history collections around the world.
The four-year project used four high-resolution cameras operated by 100 staff and 42 volunteers. It cost £15 million, or US$20 million, and was funded by the UK government.
Kew’s executive director of science, Alexandre Antonelli, said the project would help democratise access to the institution’s resources by making them available to researchers worldwide.
“In this four-year project, every cupboard and every box has been opened,” Kew botanist Sarah Phillips, who led the digitisation project, said.
The digital images capture the pressed specimens and the labels attached to them, including information about where, when and by whom they were collected.
Kew released the collection on the same day as its 2026 State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report, which says digitisation and artificial intelligence can transform plant and fungi science.
The report was released alongside 52 peer-reviewed papers published in the journals Plants People Planet and New Phytologist.
It says 400,000 plant species have been scientifically described, and there could be another 100,000 still to be found. Of the species already known to science, 29,748 are classified as at risk of extinction.
Fewer than 1,000 plant species have been formally declared extinct, but the report says the true number could be much larger.
Fungi are sometimes described as the “dark matter” of biology. There are about 205,000 classified species, but there could be millions more, Kew lead mycologist Ester Gaya said at a briefing for reporters on 15 June.
The previous State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report found that about 18,000 new plants and fungi were described between 2020 and 2023, but that most of those discoveries were also at higher risk of extinction.
“Taxonomy is now effectively in a race against extinction”, according to a Kew statement.
The report also says herbarium type specimens are now mostly held in the countries or regions where they were discovered, reversing a pattern from centuries of colonial rule when most were held in Europe or North America.
Kew and London’s Natural History Museum were described as relatively early adopters of digitisation, but millions of botanical, mycological and zoological samples remain underused at dozens of smaller institutions across the United Kingdom.
The UK government has started a 10-year, £155.6 million project called Distributed System of Scientific Collections UK, or DISSCO-UK, to help bring those collections online.
Research led by economist Helen Hardy, then at the Natural History Museum, found that digitising natural history collections could add up to £2 billion to the UK economy.
“We are at a moment in time where digitization is more efficient and effective than before,” Hardy said.
The report says AI tools have become invaluable in the field and in museums, especially image recognition systems that can speed up species identification, help determine if a species is new to science, and track if its range and populations are shrinking or shifting geographically.
“We can use digital assets, AI and other technologies to harness the information locked in specimens that have been here for centuries,” Antonelli said at the briefing for reporters.
Kew also said “digitization and mathematical models can significantly help speed up the naming of new species and extinction assessments.”
“It’s 250 years of material with different forms of handwriting, and it’s very inconsistent,” Kew botanist Alan Paton said. “AI could now be instrumental in extracting more information from the scans of the often-handwritten labels.”
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