Kew symposium spotlights digitization of fungal collections and biodiversity
Kew’s Fungarium, with more than 1.25 million dried specimens, will anchor a three-day debate on how digitized fungi collections sharpen IDs and conservation decisions.
The hybrid meeting runs from Monday, June 29 to Wednesday, July 1, 2026, at Kew Gardens in London and online, with six themed sessions built around digitisation, specimen science, biodiversity data, policy, and a special session on the powers and pitfalls of AI. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew's State of the World’s Plants and Fungi symposium will focus on how scanned specimens, DNA, and online access change the way fungi get named, tracked, and protected.
Kew's 2026 report, subtitled The Digital Biodiversity Revolution, was published on June 16 and marks the sixth report in the series and the tenth anniversary of the project. It brings together more than 400 scientists across more than 170 institutions in 40 countries, and it is accompanied by 52 open-access papers in New Phytologist and Plants, People, Planet. The workshop discussions are intended to feed an open-access publication.
The Fungarium holds more than 1.25 million dried specimens from all seven continents. Kew describes it as the world’s largest fungal collection, with well over half of known global fungal diversity and about 50,000 type specimens. Some records trace the collection back to 1879.
The project aims to give open access to 7 million preserved specimens and 1.25 million fungi by March 2026, while a separate digitisation guide puts completion at more than 8.3 million plant and fungal specimens freely accessible from the past 300-plus years. Digitised and DNA-enabled work has recovered fungal DNA from specimens up to 180 years old, opening a route to better species delimitation, new medicines, crop protection, and disease prediction.
Better specimen access improves taxonomy, rarer species can be compared against type material without crossing an ocean, and digitised records strengthen habitat and climate analyses that feed directly into conservation rules. Kew says digitised specimens have already helped reveal a global flowering-time shift of 2.5 days per decade over the last century.
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