State of the World's Plants and Fungi

Harvard University Herbaria was one of more than 170 institutions spread across 40 countries that contributed to the sixth edition of the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, "State of the World's Plants and Fungi" report.

Professor Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Director of the Herbaria, led work testing reflectance spectroscopy — a technique that measures how light bounces off leaf tissue — on pressed herbarium specimens. Her team found that spectral data from preserved leaves could predict functional traits, such as leaf mass per area, nearly as accurately as data from freshly pressed material, opening the door to mining vast herbarium collections for global ecological insights. The results, published in New Phytologist, are one of two studies from the Herbaria highlighted in the report.

Also contributing to the report is a study led by PhD candidate Ryan Schmidt-Knapik and Professor Charles Davis published in New Phytologist. Davis, curator of vascular plants, and Schmidt-Knapik examined more than two million digitized specimens from the north-eastern United States. Analyzing records from 9,247 collectors, they uncovered six shared collecting habits — such as favoring peak growing seasons and easy-to-identify species — that have quietly skewed botanical records for over a century. Davis also served as part of the core writing and editing team.

The three researchers were part of 400-plus contributing experts. Together, their studies underscore a broader theme: digitized collections are turning historic plant specimens into powerful tools for understanding both ecology and the human biases embedded in scientific data.