About Data Portal

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has been undertaking botanical and mycological research for almost 200 years. In the new Kew Data Portal, we are bringing together our large collection of taxonomic, specimen, and trait data in a single website.

For the initial release, our main focus is our herbarium collection, comprising over seven million specimens, and supporting taxonomic information. Kew is currently undertaking an ambitious plan to completely digitise this collection, capturing high-resolution images and associated metadata, by March 2026. At present, about one million records have already been digitised, and more will be made available to the portal as digitisation proceeds. Data about our other collections, including our collection of living seed held at the Millennium Seed Bank, and our fungarium collection.

The portal has been built using open-source software originally developed to support the Atlas of Living Australia.

The digitisation of our collections and the online portal have been part-funded by Defra, a Kew Fund appeal, private philanthropists, and the first Chairman of Kew’s Board of Trustees, Lord John Eccles.