The Guardian16 Jun 2026Innovation
Automatically composed with AI from the cited sources
A major report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, involving 400 scientists across 40 countries, found that an AI model trained on 8m digitised specimens detected a 2.5-day-per-decade shift in flowering times over the last century. Kew itself has now digitised all 7.4m of its specimens and made them freely online, a four-year programme that captured 20,000 high-resolution images a day at its peak, while globally only 145m digital specimens exist online — less than 16% of total herbarium holdings.