Kew digitizes 7.4 million specimens for global researchers

Kew digitizes – The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in southwest London has finished digitizing 7.4 million plant and fungi specimens, making the full digital collection free to access worldwide. The four-year project cost £15 million and uses high-resolution cameras operated by

The cupboards and boxes at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, have been opened—systematically, photograph by photograph. On 16 June. the gardens announced it has completed digitization of 7.4 million specimens from one of the world’s largest collections of plant and fungi. releasing the full digital collection for researchers worldwide free of charge.

The project was built around four high-resolution cameras operated by 100 staff and 42 volunteers. Kew said it cost £15 million (US$20 million) and was funded by the UK government. Digital images now capture more than pressed specimens: they also include labelling that records where. when and by whom samples were collected.

Kew’s executive director of science. Alexandre Antonelli. said making the digitized collection available will “help to democratize access” to Kew’s resources by putting them in the hands of researchers around the world. Kew botanist Sarah Phillips. who led the digitization project. described the effort in plain terms: “In this four-year project. every cupboard and every box has been opened.”.

The release comes with two key routes to reach those images. Kew says it has made its full digital collection available on its website, where it can be searched. It will also be searchable via the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a portal to natural-history collections around the world.

What makes this moment feel urgent is how the digitization project lands alongside Kew’s newly released 2026 State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report. Kew published the report on the same day, along with 52 peer-reviewed papers in the journals Plants People Planet and New Phytologist.

The report paints discovery and loss as moving targets. It says 400,000 plant species have been scientifically described, and that there may be an additional 100,000 yet to be discovered. Among species known to science, 29,748 are classified as at risk of extinction. Fewer than 1,000 have been formally declared extinct, but the report concludes the true number could be much larger.

Fungi are part of the picture too. Ester Gaya, Kew’s lead mycologist, said at a briefing for reporters on 15 June that fungi are sometimes described as the ‘dark matter’ of biology—about 205,000 classified species exist, but there could be millions more.

The report also notes a fast pace of naming and description. In the three years between 2020 and 2023. some 18. 000 new plants and fungi had been described. based on Kew’s previous State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report. But it also found that most of those new discoveries fall into higher levels of extinction risk.

That tension is framed by Kew as a race. “Taxonomy is now effectively in a race against extinction”, according to a Kew statement.

It’s not only the urgency that Kew wants readers to see. The report highlights the return of some botanical power to where specimens actually originate. During centuries of colonial rule. Europe or North America held most herbarium type specimens—the ones biologists use when first scientifically describing a plant. The report says the majority are now in the countries or regions where they were discovered.

Digitization and artificial intelligence sit at the center of Kew’s argument for how to respond. The 2026 report describes how AI tools have become valuable in the field and in museums worldwide. Image recognition. the report says. can speed identification of species—whether it is new to science—and help track whether ranges and populations are shrinking or shifting geographically.

Antonelli said at the reporters’ briefing that Kew can “use digital assets. AI and other technologies to harness the information locked in specimens that have been here for centuries.” Kew also says “digitization and mathematical models can significantly help speed up the naming of new species and extinction assessments.”.

Even the physical reality of older specimens turns into a technical challenge the report tries to solve. Alan Paton. a Kew botanist. said: “It’s 250 years of material with different forms of handwriting. and it’s very inconsistent.” He added that AI could be instrumental in extracting more information from the scans of often-handwritten labels.

Kew’s digitization effort matters beyond the collections it represents. While Kew and London’s Natural History Museum have been relatively early adopters, millions of botanical, mycological and zoological samples lie underused at dozens of smaller institutions across the United Kingdom.

The UK government has begun stepping into that gap with a ten-year, £155.6-million project called Distributed System of Scientific Collections UK (DISSCO-UK) designed to help those collections come online.

There is also an economic case attached to the push for digitized collections. Research led by economist Helen Hardy—then at the Natural History Museum—found that digitizing natural-history collections could add up to £2 billion to the UK economy. Hardy said: “We are at a moment in time where digitization is more efficient and effective than before.”.

Taken together, Kew’s announcement and its report leave little room for delay. When 7.4 million specimens are digitized and searchable through global platforms. the bottleneck shifts from access to interpretation—whether scientists can use images. AI and mathematical models quickly enough to keep taxonomy moving as extinction risk tightens its grip. The project. expensive and labor-intensive as it is. points toward one practical answer: open the data. then build the tools to read it fast.

Royal Botanic Gardens Kew digitization specimens plant and fungi AI in science biodiversity Global Biodiversity Information Facility taxonomy extinction risk