Royal Botanic Gardens Kew: AI and digitisation transform fight against global extinction, landmark report reveals. “In a seismic shift since Kew’s inaugural State of the World’s report ten years ago, the sixth State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report, published 16 June 2026, brings together expertise from over 400 scientists across 40 countries to explore how new technology is […]

Nature: ‘Every box has been opened’: London botanic gardens digitizes 7 million specimens. “The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in southwest London announced on 16 June that it has completed the digitization of 7.4 million specimens. The project, which used four high-resolution cameras operated by 100 staff and 42 volunteers, cost £15 million (US$20 million) and was funded by the UK government.”

University of Illinois Chicago: Pressed plants reveal living genetic messages, decades later . “In a new study, researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago extracted viable RNA, the essential messenger of genetic information, from plants from museum collections. This research breakthrough will make it possible for scientists to study plant evolution, gene regulation and adaptation using […]

University of North Carolina: UNC-Chapel Hill study shows AI can dramatically speed up digitizing natural history collections. “A new study from UNC-Chapel Hill researchers shows that advanced artificial intelligence tools, specifically large language models (LLMs), can accurately determine the locations where plant specimens were originally collected, a process known as georeferencing. This […]

Februar 9 @ 16:00 - 17:00 CET
[Webinar] From Drawers to the Open Web: Wikidata for Natural History Museum Collections

https://winoda.de/en/event/webinar-wikidata/

#naturalhistory #museums #collections #specimens #wikidata

NOLA: There are 8 million fish in a World War II bunker outside New Orleans. More arrive soon.. “Downriver from New Orleans, behind heavy doors in grass-covered bunkers that stored artillery during World War II, are millions of dead fish. They’re preserved and cataloged in rows of glass jars, each one a time capsule, a specimen pulled from a particular place on a particular day, labeled so […]

Straits Times: Watch the making of S-E Asia’s largest digital plant database at Singapore Botanic Gardens. “At the Singapore Botanic Gardens, visitors can now watch botanists painstakingly build a digital database of some 800,000 specimens from South-east Asia and beyond. From a viewing gallery, they can observe the plants being unpacked, barcoded, placed on a conveyor belt and photographed […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/10/31/straits-times-watch-the-making-of-s-e-asias-largest-digital-plant-database-at-singapore-botanic-gardens/

Discovered this interesting resource. While reading a gizmodo article on recent ocean discovery's. You can view this site to look up it seems the things we have and have yet to discover about our oceans.

https://dataplatform.oceancensus.org/en

#marinelife #deep-sea #specimens #data #ocean