GoKawiilCredit: Jeff Eden/RBG Kew
Digital specimens from one of the world’s largest collections of plant and fungi are being made available to researchers from all over the world, free of charge.
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in southwest London announced on 16 June that it has 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 (US$20 million) and was funded by the UK government.
On the same day, Kew also released its 2026 State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report, highlighting how digitization and artificial intelligence (AI) can transform plant and fungi science.
Kew is making its full digital collection available on its website, which will also be searchable via the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a portal to natural-history collections around the world. Kew’s executive director of science, Alexandre Antonelli, says that the digitization project will help to democratize access to its resources by making them available to researchers worldwide.
“In this four-year project, every cupboard and every box has been opened,” says Kew botanist Sarah Phillips, who led the digitization project. Digital pictures capture not only the pressed specimens, but also labelling that contains crucial information about where, when and by whom they were collected.
While Kew and London’s Natural History Museum have been relatively early adopters of digitization, millions of botanical, mycological and zoological samples lie underused at dozens of smaller institutions around the United Kingdom. The UK government has recently kickstarted a ten-year, £155.6 million project called Distributed System of Scientific Collections UK (DISSCO-UK) to help those collections come online, too.
Research1,2 led by economist Helen Hardy, then at the Natural History Museum, has found that by digitizing 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 says.
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The State of the World’s Plants and Fungi was unveiled together with 52 peer-reviewed papers published in the journals Plants People Planet and New Phytologist.
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