State of the World's Plants and Fungi 2026: Why This Year's Kew Report Is a Fungi Story

Every couple of years, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew takes the planet's pulse and writes it up. The latest edition, the State of the World's Plants and Fungi 2026, just landed, and the fungi section is the one worth your attention. The short version: we have formally assessed the extinction risk of less than 1% of known fungal species, scientists are naming new fungi faster than they ever have, and Kew just put 7.4 million specimens online so the rest of us can help close the gap. This is the sixth report in the series and marks ten years of Kew doing this, and it's the most collaborative one yet, pulling in more than 400 scientists across 170-plus institutions in 40 countries.

A decade of taking stock, now with a search bar

The big operational news behind this year's report is boring in the best way. Kew finished a four-year project to scan every one of the 7.4 million dried specimens in its herbarium and fungarium and upload them to a free public portal. Some of these pressed plants and fungi go back centuries.

Why does that matter? Until now, studying Kew's collection meant booking a trip to London or waiting for fragile specimens to travel through the mail. You can still do that, but you can also pull up a 200-year-old mushroom on your laptop from anywhere on Earth. That shift sounds administrative, but it changes who gets to do science. A researcher in Lagos or Lima no longer needs a plane ticket and a grant to examine the same specimens a London-based scientist can. Cheaper, faster, and far more collaborative.

The extinction numbers come with a giant asterisk

Here is the headline figure: 29,748 plant species and 411 fungal species are currently listed as at risk of extinction. Alarming on its own, but the more honest reading is what sits underneath it. Only about 18% of known plants and less than 1% of known fungi have actually been assessed. The 411 at-risk fungi aren't the full picture. They're the sliver we've gotten around to checking.

The report gives this blind spot a name: the Katuš shortfall. Katuš means "to go away" in Yaghan, an Indigenous language from Tierra del Fuego whose last fluent native speaker died in 2022. The term captures something uncomfortable. A species can vanish before anyone describes it, and even a named species can slip away without anyone noticing it's gone. Proving something isn't there anymore is genuinely hard. Kew's bet is that digitized data fed into the same statistical models used for birds and mammals can shrink that uncertainty for fungi too.

Fungi are being named faster than ever, and we've barely started

Between 2024 and 2025, scientists named more than 7,800 fungal species new to science, alongside roughly 4,600 plants. Fungi are now being described faster than at any point in history. Feels like progress, until you see the denominator: an estimated 2 million-plus fungal species are still completely unknown to us, compared with around 100,000 unknown plants.

Think about what that means. The fungal kingdom is one of the least catalogued branches of life on the planet, and we're trying to inventory it during an extinction crisis. You can't protect what you haven't named, and you can't name 2 million species at the current pace without help. This is the gap the report keeps circling back to, and it's the reason so much of the 2026 edition is about tools rather than discoveries. Now we have a global mychorrhizal fungi map!

Two-hundred-year-old mushrooms are giving up their DNA

This is the part that should make any mushroom person sit up. Mycologists at Kew's Fungarium can now extract and read the full DNA sequence of fungi that have been sitting in the collection for nearly 200 years. Specimens collected before the invention of the photograph are now contributing genetic data to the fungal tree of life.

That isn't just record-keeping. Reading old fungal genomes opens centuries of stored specimens to fresh questions, and the questions are practical ones. Researchers are hunting through these collections for fungi that might break down plastic, produce new medicines, or serve as high-protein food sources. The report also flags newly described species along the way, like the rust-capped Russula neopascua. Every old specimen that gives up its genome is a lottery ticket scientists couldn't cash until the technology caught up.

Is AI actually nature's ally? Kew says yes, with conditions

The report's framing question is whether technology helps nature, and the answer it lands on is a qualified yes. Machine-learning tools can sort enormous piles of data quickly, flag specimens that look like potential new species, and large language models are being trained to transcribe the handwritten labels on digitized specimens, a task that used to eat thousands of human hours.

Kew is refreshingly clear-eyed about the limits. An AI model is only as good as the expert who trains it, no model is fully accurate, and every output still needs a human to check it. The goal isn't to replace mycologists. It's to hand the tedious work to machines so scientists can spend their time on new and threatened species. As a proof of concept, researchers used AI to analyze 8 million plant specimens and found that flowering times have shifted by an average of 2.5 days per decade over the past century, with the biggest changes in the tropics. That was the first global study of its kind, though the finding is a measured trend pulled from specimen records rather than proof of any single cause.

What a report about herbaria has to do with your dinner

You might be wondering why a mushroom marketplace cares about a botanical institution digitizing its filing cabinets. Because the same kingdom Kew is racing to catalogue is the one behind the lion's mane in your pan and the reishi in your tea. The medicinal compounds, the novel food sources, the plastic-eating enzymes the report gets excited about all start as a named species in a collection somewhere. The boring work of cataloguing fungi is the foundation everything else gets built on.

The bottom line

The State of the World's Plants and Fungi 2026 report is, at its core, an honest accounting of how little we know about fungi and a plan to fix it faster. We've assessed under 1% of fungal species, there are more than 2 million we haven't met, and the new approach is to digitize the world's collections and point AI at the backlog while human experts steer. It's not a triumphant report. It's a useful one, and for a kingdom that's been an afterthought in conservation for decades, useful is a real step forward.

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