Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report provides a key overview of the current knowledge of the diversity of plants and fungi on Earth, the global threats that they face, and the policies to safeguard them. The report draws on the expertise of more than 400 experts from 170 institutions across 40 countries, including CBCS’s Associate Professor Diana Fisher who co-authored Chapter 7 'New ways to quantify global and local extinctions could enhance understanding of plant diversity loss'.
The 2026 report has a central theme of the Digital Biodiversity Revolution – exploring how digital tools are now transforming our ability to understand and respond to the climate and biodiversity crises, as well as how such technological advances can expose critical gaps in knowledge and highlight where action is needed.
Diana explains that her contributions to the Report aimed to highlight new methods for understanding plant extinctions. “Since the 1990s, we have probabilistic models available that use historical sighting dates to estimate the chance that purportedly extinct species are truly extinct. Simone Blomberg (statistical modeller on this) and I have used them to test extinction likelihood for many species of mammals, and others have tested extinct birds,” she explains. “My colleague in Sweden Aelys Humphries was interested to know how these models apply to plants, we looked at how animals and plants have been modelled and found that very few plants have been assessed with probabilistic methods like this. Aelys and other plant conservationists are now using digitised herbarium data to test extinction probability in plants. We have a PhD student (Naomi) who is combining this with AI methods. The new state of the world's plants and fungi report led by Kew in the UK focuses on these new approaches and technology for understanding plant extinction.”
To learn more and read the full report, see here.
