Over 7.4 million plant and fungal specimens at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew have now been digitized, turning centuries of herbarium collections into a global, open data resource for biodiversity science.
➡️ Yet fewer than 16% of the world’s ~406 million herbarium specimens are imaged and online, with most of those still concentrated in the Global North.
As Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2026 report underscores, this “digital biodiversity revolution” is already shifting our understanding of extinction risk, climate impacts and flowering phenology, including a global average shift in plant flowering times of around 2.5 days per decade over the last century. 🌺
One of the most important messages in Kew’s 2026 State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report is that digitization is still heavily skewed toward herbaria in the Global North, leaving “silent collections” and major data gaps in the Global South. This imbalance distorts our view of biodiversity, conservation priorities and climate impacts…especially in regions that underpin much of the world’s herbal trade.
For those of us working at the interface of ethnobotany, natural products and functional medicine, these datasets are not abstract. They influence how we model species vulnerability, design resilient supply chains, and re‑center Global South collections and Indigenous knowledge in conservation and sourcing decisions.
Reference: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 2026. State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2026: Is technology the answer? Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London.