Overview
- Kew completed and released its digitisation of 7.4 million herbarium and fungarium specimens on 16 June 2026, making high-resolution images and labels freely searchable through Kew’s site and GBIF.
- A global AI study trained on about eight million specimen images covering roughly 200,000 species found average shifts in flowering of 2.5 days earlier or later per decade, with larger regional changes in the tropics.
- The project cost about £15 million and used multiple imaging stations, staff and volunteers, and the new open collection feeds into a worldwide network of some 145 million digitised records for researchers to use.
- Kew’s 2026 State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report warns of major gaps in knowledge: fewer than 20% of plants and about 0.6% of fungi have formal extinction assessments and many species remain undescribed.
- Government funding and national efforts such as DISSCO‑UK aim to scale digitisation and AI tools so scientists can prioritise species at risk, search for climate‑resilient crop relatives, and recover genomic data from century‑old fungal specimens.