In a seismic shift since Kew's inaugural State of the World's report ten years ago, the sixth State of the World's Plants and Fungi report, published 16 June 2026, brings together expertise from over 400 scientists across 40 countries to explore how new technology is transforming the race to save nature. The report argues technology can be nature's ally, with digital tools exposing critical gaps in scientific knowledge and highlighting where action is most urgently needed to safeguard plants and fungi.
Plants and fungi underpin all life on Earth, regulating climate, storing carbon and supplying food and medicines. Without reliable data on what species exist, where they occur globally and the impacts of a changing climate, this report warns that conservation efforts may overlook the most vulnerable species, and opportunities for new medicines and sustainable future crops may be lost.
Professor Alexandre Antonelli, Executive Director of Science at RBG Kew, says: 'This report provides an incredibly rich and exciting preview of the future of plants and fungi. Scientists, practitioners and anyone with a keen interest in biodiversity are now being equipped with unprecedented data and tools to learn and contribute in ways that are faster, better and more impactful than ever before. The digital revolution is breaking down the barriers of physical distance and access, catalysing more equitable collaboration at a truly global level. While documenting and protecting all life on Earth remain formidable challenges, digitisation and accompanying technologies make me increasingly hopeful that we'll succeed.'
Technology – nature's ally?
Despite the scale of the crisis, the report identifies a major turning point driven by rapid advances in AI, digitisation and global data-sharing. For centuries, scientists worldwide have pressed, dried and labelled plants and fungi collected from every corner of the Earth, inaccessible to most. Until now. Thanks to technological developments, millions of preserved plant and fungal specimens are being digitised and analysed at unprecedented scale, allowing researchers to compare material remotely, correct misidentified species and uncover previously hidden biodiversity, transforming conservation efforts and offering hope for the future. For example:
In Costa Rica, researchers increased the country's known fungal diversity by nearly 20% by combining published records with digitised collections, providing new insights into how climate influences fungal distribution and establishing critical baselines for future research.
AI can 'learn' how to identify challenging plants such as sedges and peat mosses that have microscopic distinguishing features, helping taxonomists identify species more quickly and pinpoint those that could be new to science.
Smartphone images of an unusual plant were sent to scientists at Kew by researchers working in peatlands in the Republic of Congo. These indicated it could be a new species in the genus Sabicea. Digital imagery and real-time collaboration can support new species descriptions when combined with physical and digitised specimens, particularly in remote or under-surveyed regions.
Scientists at Kew's Millennium Seed Bank and the Morton Arboretum (USA) have shown that digitised data on where and how seeds were collected can be used to estimate the genetic diversity held in seed banks, helping experts make better-informed decisions around restoring habitats and reintroducing threatened plant species to the wild.
Digitisation record
The report comes as Kew completes a groundbreaking project, funded principally by the UK government through Defra, digitising all 7.4 million herbarium and fungarium specimens in its collections. If all specimen images were laid end to end, they would stretch for nearly 3,000 km – far enough to reach from Kew to the fringes of eastern Canada. What is emerging from those cupboards and boxes is extraordinary: species new to science, new understandings of the past, the fingerprints of climate change hidden in flowers pressed a century ago and more. Digitisation helps us discover new life, understand loss, track change, unlock collections, share knowledge more fairly and understand challenges more clearly, helping us find new solutions to protecting and understanding life on Earth. This new online resource provides researchers, policymakers and conservationists worldwide free access to one of the world's most comprehensive botanical and fungal resources.
Mary Creagh, Minister for Nature at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says: 'It was an honour to be invited to scan the final specimen in Kew's extraordinary 7.4 million-strong herbarium and fungarium collection. Making this important data globally accessible isn't just a scientific milestone, but it also unlocks a treasure trove of useful knowledge. With Defra's support, this kind of digital transformation is putting vital biodiversity data into the hands of researchers, policymakers and conservationists everywhere, helping us act faster and more fairly to protect nature, adapt to climate change and support sustainable livelihoods.
The tide is turning on over 400 years of inequality in science
While new technologies are creating unprecedented opportunities, the report warns that major gaps in global biodiversity data continue to limit global action.
Despite growing international efforts, fewer than 16% of the world's herbarium specimens have currently been imaged and made available digitally1, leaving huge blind spots in our understanding. The gaps are particularly pronounced in parts of the Global South, where little known and under-digitised 'silent herbaria' impact global biodiversity models and climate predictions, and conservation decisions are therefore being made using incomplete or biased information. In Honduras, digitised herbarium records revealed that around 33% of the total species recorded from protected areas were missing from conservation management plans, while poorly connected collections in countries such as Nigeria remain largely invisible to global biodiversity science, despite holding vitally important information.
However, well targeted investments can make a difference. For instance, the Today's Flora for Tomorrow project has digitised 37,000 specimens from Madagascar, helping to ensure Malagasy scientists can access and use these plant and fungal specimens and their data to understand and conserve Madagascar's rich biodiversity.
Landy Rajaovelona, Senior Botanist at Kew Madagascar, says: 'Madagascar is one of the world's most extraordinary biodiversity hotspots, yet many of its plant and fungal species remain undocumented, understudied and increasingly at risk. By digitising our physical collections, we unlock a treasure of knowledge spanning centuries, offering invaluable insights into today's biodiversity.
'This work, undertaken in collaboration with the Botanical and Zoological Park of Tsimbazaza (PBZT) on behalf of the TAN herbarium, is transforming biodiversity records into accessible digital resources. We are taking active steps towards assessing extinction risks, effective conservation, and training the next generation of Malagasy scientists. And by making the biodiversity data more accessible to local and international expertise such as researchers, decision-makers, and conservationists we can help ensure that Madagascar's unique plants continue to inspire discovery, support livelihoods, and sustain healthy ecosystems for generations to come.'
New technologies can also help shift power, credit and scientific capacity back to the countries of origin, and for the first time in modern history, many holotypes (the original reference specimen used to name a new species for the first time) are remaining in the countries where they were collected. The report reveals the average distance between where a holotype specimen was collected and the herbarium it is now stored in has dropped by 70%, from nearly 9,000 km at the start of the 19th century to 2,654 km at the start of the 21st century. Digitised collections are also uncovering the hidden contributions of overlooked collectors, including those made by women to twentieth-century fungal science, WW1 soldiers collecting plants on the front line, citizen scientists and Indigenous communities. Digitising ethnobotanical collections 2 has revealed little-known uses, preserved traditional knowledge, connected communities with their past, and is fostering collaborative and intercultural studies.
The true scale of extinction has been underestimated
29,748 species of plants and 411 species of fungi are now threatened with extinction3, 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; many more are likely to have disappeared. Consequently, the true scale of extinctions has likely been underestimated.
The challenge is compounded by the fact that over 100,000 plant species and more than 2 million fungal species are unknown to science (less than 10% of fungal life has been described to date), many of which could become extinct before being named and understood. More than 4,600 plant and 7,800 fungal species were named as new to science in 2024 and 2025 (including Purpureocillium atlanticum, a fungus found in Brazil's Atlantic Forest erupting from a trapdoor spider that it had infected and consumed). However, the process of naming a species as new to science can be very slow, exemplified by the ghost palm of Borneo (Plectocomiopsis hantu) which was named 92 years after it was first collected. What's more, the rate at which new plant species are named has remained constant for decades, and while for fungi the rate is higher, we are still barely scratching the surface. Scientists warn the pace needs to increase as taxonomy is now effectively in a race against extinction. Digitisation and mathematical models can significantly help speed up the naming of new species and extinction assessments.
The report also recognises the need to fundamentally rethink how extinction is assessed, highlighting that traditional approaches – which treat species as either living or extinct – fail to reflect reality. In practice extinction is often uncertain, with many species rare, poorly recorded or under-surveyed, making absence hard to prove. Consequently, the 'unknown loss of biodiversity' – the unrecorded loss of both known and unknown species – is a significant knowledge gap (coined the Katuš shortfall), and a dangerous blind spot for conservation.
To address this, scientists propose the use of probability models, using digitised herbarium records, sighting histories and statistical models to estimate whether a species is truly extinct or simply undetected. These approaches are already used widely in animal conservation but have only recently begun to be applied to plants and fungi, with the potential to reveal a large hidden gap between real versus documented extinctions. They can similarly be used to predict the probability that species and populations will go extinct in the future, helping focus conservation efforts.
Climate change is altering nature's timing in complex and unpredictable ways
Digitised herbarium specimens have also facilitated new work in the tropics and Arctic – areas which are understudied largely due to logistical challenges. The first comprehensive global study of flowering time, which used AI to analyse eight million digitised herbarium specimens, reveals flowering has shifted by an average of 2.5 days per decade over the past century. These changes are not uniform, with flowering happening earlier or later depending on the location, revealing climate change is altering nature's timing in complex and unpredictable ways. In some regions, shifts appear to be driven not just by temperature, but by changing rainfall patterns. The length and synchronicity of flowering seasons is also being affected, disrupting long-established relationships between plants and pollinators. For example:
In India's Western Ghats, an important forest tree (Terminalia paniculata) has shown a marked decline in synchronised flowering, dropping from 79% in the 1950s to 47% in the 1990s, threatening pollinators and wider ecosystem stability.
In the Canadian Arctic, plant flowering times are changing inconsistently between species, and the flowering season is getting shorter. These seemingly small changes can have major consequences at the global scale.
A genomic revolution in fungi
For the first time, scientists are producing high-quality genomes (comparable to fresh material) from very old specimens, some up to 180 years old. By effectively unlocking genomes frozen in time, this breakthrough opens the use of centuries of preserved specimens in fungaria worldwide, making historical fungarium specimens a genomic goldmine for new medicines, protecting crops and predicting disease outbreaks.
With more than 90% of fungal species still unknown to science, this ability to unlock the secrets of known species could transform our understanding of one of the most important kingdoms of life and lead to a multitude of new uses. This breakthrough also underpins a much bigger ambition, as Kew, along with UK partners, embarks on a project to create the world's largest fungal genome library. It aims to sequence thousands of species, including many that are rare, extinct in the wild, or have never been sampled for DNA sequencing.
Irina Druzhinina, Senior Research Leader in Fungal Diversity & Systematics at RBG Kew, says: 'Fungal taxonomy remains one of science's most exhilarating frontiers of discovery even though it may also be the most daunting one we face.'
A call for global collaboration
The report concludes that improving, connecting and sharing biodiversity data globally is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to strengthen conservation efforts. Linking herbaria, seed banks and management plans digitally can dramatically improve conservation outcomes and enable faster, more targeted action to prevent extinctions. Brazil's highly coordinated digital biodiversity infrastructure that connects specimen databases, virtual herbaria, taxonomic resources and conservation tools exemplifies how better-connected data can drive faster, more effective action, rapidly identify biodiversity gaps and uncover overlooked species.
However, the report stresses it is essential that this sharing is equitable. Digitisation and AI could amplify existing errors, biases and inequalities if underlying data are not expanded and improved, and therefore there is a critical need for standardised practices, better training and coordinated international action.
As Martin Cheek, Senior Research Leader at RBG Kew says: 'The potential for AI is enormous, but it is still currently potential.'
The report therefore calls for novel partnerships between the technology sector and environment organisations, alongside calls to governments and funders to invest in under‑resourced collections. By working together, we can collectively accelerate our understanding of biodiversity, prevent its loss and guide its recovery.
