Highlights from the State Of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2026

Last week I attended the State Of the World’s Plants and Fungi at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London. The theme for was The digital biodiversity revolution. More than 240 delegates participated in person at Kew and over 1,000 online for three days of thought-provoking presentations and discussions about how to unlock the full potential of the world’s plant and fungal collections. Attention was also given to the worlds fungi, and I was lucky to visit Kew’s Fungarium which holds 1.25 million dried – roughly half of all known global fungal diversity!

Digitisation is a hot topic. Many herbaria all over the world are working towards digitisation of their herbarium and digitised specimens. Globally, 64 million digitised preserved plant and fungal specimens are available online for anyone. Kew itself recently completed the digitisation of 145 million specimens of plants and fungi at Kew. Often mentioned was the world’s largest biodiversity data portal; the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which is amalgamating digital specimen information about all life on Earth and making it freely available online.

Why does this matter? This meta collection of digitised specimens allows global research into climate change impacts, biodiversity loss, geographical distribution of species, reducing knowledge gaps and much more. To make sense off this vast amount of data, the use of Artificial Intelligence is instrumental in the detecting patterns, measuring shapes and sizes of plant parts, leaf shapes, absence or presence of flowers deciphering label text. Insights gained can for example help identify species that need to be prioritised for conservation.

Some of the highlights of the symposium

A group discussion on supporting digitisation in biodiverse, low-income countries, what is required why does it matter, and how can we fund them?

 “Absence of knowledge is not knowledge of absence” How do we truly know that the last member of a species has been lost? Digitised specimen data can be used to accelerate and improve estimates of ongoing species extinction.

The idea of ‘silent herbaria’. This was introduced by Mr Zhigila from Nigeria. ‘Silent herbaria’ refers to under-recognised, under-resourced and largely absent from global data infrastructures. Their silence introduces important implications for global biodiversity research. 

What happens when we digitise ethnobotanical data

The sessions that were most interesting to me were on the 3rd and last day of the symposium, as the focus was on the biocultural wealth of collections. 

Ethnobotanist Ina Vandebroek spoke about the responsible digitisation of biocultural data in herbarium collections. Many plant and fungal collections contain cultural knowledge about how Indigenous and local communities name, use and relate to species. For example, uses of plants for medicine, food, crafts and more. This invites a discussion on ethics and rights. How can researchers avoid exposing communities to risks from cultural misappropriation, commercial exploitation by outsiders or increased pressure on culturally important species? Solutions suggested were to develop pathways to identify what knowledge can and cannot be shared, co-creating digitisation project its and recognising community contributors, including named individuals where requested. To avoid misappropriation and exploitation it was suggested to; develop pathways to identify what knowledge can be shared, co-create digitisation projects, and recognising community contributors.

The power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence

I was hoping to hear more critical conversations about the environmental impact of AI. The topic was briefly discussed in the final session ‘Supercharging biodiversity conservation: The powers and pitfalls of AI’.

Pitfalls; inaccuracy and bias, increased global inequality in terms of access to technology and AI, increased barrier of entry to the job market – how to learn to check for accuracy without experience? I was disappointed by the lack of critical conversation aboutthe environmental impact of AI throughout. The topic was discussed in the final session and responses from the panel included: it is important to consider the nuance in forms of AI, for example a small, specialised local LLM will use significantly less energy, in addition, efficiency is increasing, and energy consumption varies significantly between AI training vs AI queries; a query supposedly only uses the same amount of energy as 9 seconds of tv streaming.

Personally I do think we can’t speak about the digitisation and AI revolution and ignore the detrimental impact of AI on ecosystems, biodiversity climate change and local and indigenous communities. As well as botanists and ecologists potentially losing connection to nature when knowledge is increasingly mediated by AI & digital interfaces. As a biodiversity science community there is a responsibility to understand, mediate and raise awareness about these detrimental impacts on biodiversity.

All in all, the State Of the World’s Plants and Fungi symposium was a very rich experience, with much knowledge shared and new connections made. Much gratitude to all the researchers and contributors to this fantastic event!

Want to know more?

You can find the full programme and recordings of the symposium on the SOWPF 2026 page.