4 June 2024
Halfway point reached! 5 million herbarium & fungarium specimens now digitised
Following two years of immense effort, we've finally reached the halfway mark and digitised 5 million herbarium and fungarium specimens - a significant achievement on our journey to unlocking a vast record of life to accelerate research on global issues
We've successfully digitised over 5 million specimens from our herbarium and fungarium collections, marking a significant step towards making our collection accessible online. This represents more than half of our entire collection!
But how did we get here?
- 3.7 million specimens were digitised through our dedicated digitisation project, with an impressive 100,000 specimens imaged each week.
- An additional 1.3 million specimens were digitised before the project began.
A major milestone
It's sometimes difficult to visualise just how many specimens have been sifted through when reaching this milestone.
To put it into perspective, if you were to line up all five million digitised specimens end-to-end, they would stretch the entire length of the UK twice!
With this in mind, reaching this milestone is a significant achievement. However, it's the largely untapped potential that this project holds and the impact it's already having that is the greatest cause for celebration.
As our Deputy Director of Science Research Dr Paul Kersey highlighted:
"What is most exciting is that we're already realising the impact of this work with researchers actively using our digitised collections to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing our planet today, including a large conservation project to protect endangered species in the British Virgin Islands. We can safely assume that the impact of unlocking our entire collection of over eight million herbarium and fungarium specimens will be immense."
This incredible achievement is a testament to the hard work of over 320 staff and volunteers. Thanks to their dedication, one of the world's largest collections of dried plants and fungi is becoming accessible online for researchers and enthusiasts around the globe.
Going global to save the world
The digital repository of plant and fungal specimens will offer invaluable insights into some of the major challenges facing the planet, including mapping extinction risks for individual species and understanding the potential impact of climate change on ecosystems, common crops and local communities.
Dr Sarah Phillips, Digital Collections Research Leader here at Kew, highlights the importance of our collection:
"Every specimen we have holds crucial data that provides a snapshot of what was growing in a particular place at a particular time. This allows us to monitor changes in plant distribution over time for a given area helping us understand how our planet's climate is changing and how to adapt to ensure food security for future generations"
Ultimately, the digitised collections will underpin research that will help future-proof agriculture, save species from extinction, ensure food security and combat the biodiversity crisis and climate change.
You can now immortalise a piece of botanic history. Donate to digitise a plant today and help us unlock nature's secrets.
What's currently accessible?
As of June 2024, you can now access the following number of specimens via GBIF and our Data Portal:
- GBIF - 2.16 million specimens available (including herbarium and fungarium collections)
- Data Portal - 1.45 million specimens available (including herbarium and fungarium collections)
Going global to combat global challenges
This digital repository will provide invaluable insights into critical environmental issues, including:
- Mapping extinction risks: Identify species facing extinction threats.
- Understanding climate change: Analyse the potential impact of climate change on ecosystems and food security.
Ultimately, these digitised collections will be a powerful tool for:
- Future-proofing agriculture
- Saving species from extinction
- Ensuring food security
- Combatting biodiversity loss and climate change
Treasures from the past, accessible for the future
These specimens don’t exist just to be examined; they can also provide tangible solutions. As detailed in a recent short film, herbarium specimens can be used to identify historically resilient plant populations that thrive in harsher, hotter climates.
By studying certain wild plants, we can identify species with valuable traits such as drought tolerance. These traits can then be bred into our food crops through selective breeding, ensuring they continue to produce good yields even in drier conditions.
Alternatively, crop relatives can be grown which are better adapted to the changing conditions.
Here's the short, animated film featuring our Head of Collections Dr Alan Paton that illustrates this:
Unveiling a hidden world
Our herbarium and fungarium collections hold a treasure trove of information about the natural world. By digitising them, we're transforming these previously hidden resources into a valuable tool for scientists and the public alike.
The project is also a reminder of the importance of preserving our natural heritage. The specimens in our collection represent a vast wealth of knowledge about the natural world that has been accumulated over centuries.
By digitising them, we are ensuring that this knowledge is not lost and can be passed on to future generations.
See opportunities below to get involved and become part of Kew’s largest ever project.
Help us digitise our prestigious collections
Get involved with these opportunities
Volunteer
Become part of Kew's ambitious project and help make one of the largest collections in the world freely accessible to everyone around the world.
Donate
Donate today and immortalise a piece of botanic history that can aid research into urgent global challenges - helping protect our planet for future generations.
Join
See what job opportunities are available to digitise our collection and play a part in helping scientists across the world access our invaluable specimens.
