Kew State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2026
This is an interesting report. It is ostensibly about digitizing herbarium and fungarium specimens, which is not a topic that receives much attention here on the iNat Forum. But if you read the report, you will see that it touches on many things that we talk about on the forum:
- GBIF
- How AI can help us document biodiversity
- Identifying by DNA
- The accuracy of herbarium and fungarium specimens
- Gaps in biodiversity knowledge when it comes to conservation
- And many more
The report is written in a user-friendly way. It has beautiful pictures, it mostly avoids technical jargon, and it defines many terms in ways that are easy to understand. Here is the table of contents:
Here is one excerpt from the report:
A time-consuming profession
"The process of naming a species as new to science can be very slow. For the ghost palm of Borneo (Plectocomiopsis hantu), which was named in 2024, it took a whopping
92 years from a specimen being filed in a herbarium to the palm being scientifically described and named"
The EDGE list (Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered) is interesting, as it notes the plant families that have the most members in the list.
It’s headed by the Araceae.
Changes in taxonomy are captured in World Flora Online and Kew’s Plants of the World Online, but 49% of [herbarium] curators globally used neither resource.
In that case, iNat plant IDs leaning on POWO are doing well !
The Cape Provinces are a ‘Botanical Country’ with 339 EDGE sp (EDGE = Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered) Madagascar has 952 sp !
This past Saturday I got back from a week in Maine, USA, at the Eagle Hill Institute, taking a 5-day class in liverworts from the wonderful Blanka Aguero. Jeff Pengel was her very able teaching assistant. At least twice a day, one of them would say something like, “No one really knows” or “Conocephalum in eastern North America might be a new species, but no one has really described it properly yet” or “That scalewort Al found turned out to be Frullania selwyniana, which hasn’t been documented from Maine before.” In other words, not enough people are looking for liverworts, nor are they documenting their findings by depositing specimens in an herbarium. (For those not familiar with liverworts - in other words, almost everyone! - I’ll note that usually they must be examined under a microscope to ID them to species, thus the need for specimens.)
At home in Massachusetts, I’m working with other botanists on a vascular plant flora of the 13,000 acres of protected land around the Quabbin Reservoir, an enormous body of water in the middle of the state. We’ve been working on this for only a year and a half now and have already found one species that was thought to be Historic in the state and somewhere around 8 or 10 new sites for state-listed rare plants. And we thought the land was “ordinary” and wouldn’t have much new and exciting!
To circle back to liverworts, there are at least 135 species known from Massachusetts since 1980 and yet there are only 1504 specimens listed in the Bryophyte Portal for the state from 1980 to the present day (plus 20 or so of my own I’ll add tomorrow, when I go to the herbarium). Ten or eleven specimens per species per half-century are not enough to assess accurately the distribution and status of each species in the state.
Why am I going on about these personal experiences? I’m trying to make the point that even in well-botanized New England in the northeastern US, there are BIG gaps in what is known. Ordinary people with a little time and enthusiasm can do a lot to add to our collective knowledge - and we all know that iNaturalists are more than just ordinary!
