Poster presentations - State of the World's Plants & Fungi Symposium
The full repertoire of posters featured at the State of the World's Plants and Fungi Symposium 2026, and how to engage with them.
Posters will be open for viewing throughout the symposium, with a changeover at lunchtime on Tuesday 30 June:
- Odd-numbered posters: Displayed from Monday 29 June until 13:00 on Tuesday 30 June
- Even-numbered posters: Displayed from 13:00 on Tuesday 30 June until the end of the symposium
Each presentation includes a one-minute flash talk followed by a designated poster session during the evening drinks reception (Monday for odd numbers; Tuesday for even numbers).
Prizes will be awarded for the best student and early career researcher posters!
P1 Towards extended digitisation of herbarium sheets: A specimen-centred framework for 13 medicinal fern species from North-West Himalayas
Mandeep Kaur, Punjabi University, India
P2 Towards digitising the Welsh National Herbarium
Heather Susan Pardoe, Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, UK
P3 From specimens to biodiversity conservation: Digitising Madagascar’s herbarium
Nivohenintsoa Rakotonirina, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Madagascar
P4 Digitising historical and contemporary floral records from Deosai National Park, Pakistan to safeguard alpine plant diversity
Shehnaz Zakia, Pakistan Museum of Natural History, Pakistan
P5 The extended specimen: Digitising Albert Grunow’s (1826–1914) diatom drawings at W
Tanja M. Schuster, Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria
P6 Leaps and bounds: Progress made and insights gained in the digitisation of the National Herbarium of Ireland (DBN)
Eva Dreyer, National Botanic Gardens, Ireland
P7 Digitising historical plant collections in Zimbabwe: Lessons for global plant knowledge
Kudakwashe Blessing Mutasa, National Herbarium and Botanic Garden, Zimbabwe
P8 Unlocking Ethiopian plant biodiversity data through GBIF: The impact of capacity enhancement initiatives
Hanny Lidetu, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
P9 Herbarium digitisation through student engagement
Petronela Camen-Comănescu, University of Bucharest, Romania
P10 The state of herbaria in China: Progress and gaps in specimen digitisation and data sharing
Xia Cui, China National Botanical Garden, China
P11 Challenges in documenting fungal diversity in Madagascar: The role of fungarium digitisation in advancing research and conservation
Anna Berthe Ralaiveloarisoa, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Madagascar
P12 Analog heritage – digital future: Perspectives from the Herbarium Berolinense
Juraj Paule, ZE Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin, Germany
P13 Levels of taxonomic curation in a digitised herbarium
Elspeth Haston, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, UK
P14 Palaeobotanical microfossil evidence and data generation on species from forest islands in disjunct Atlantic Forest formations in Brazil
Thamyres Sabrina Gonçalves, National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
P15 NaijaFLO: A comprehensive vascular plant database for biodiversity research, conservation and management
Abubakar Bello, Umaru Musa Yaradua University, Nigeria
P16 Integrating herbarium specimen and observation data: Joint use of Herbarium E and Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland records for mutual improvement
Marie Briggs, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, UK
P17 Walking, seeing, documenting: A digital archive of flora and fungi in a post-industrial landscape
Esther Tàrrega i Pallarés, Université de Caen Normandie, France
P18 You’re just my type: Specimen prioritisation, taxonomic examination and tissue sampling of Kew Fungarium’s type collection for whole genome sequencing
Emily Hodgson, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P19 The evolution of digitisation content in The Herbarium Handbook of Kew, as seen through two Chinese translations
Fei-Fei Li, China National Botanical Garden, China
P20 From specimens to stories: Unlocking fungal collections through digitisation, DNA, chemical profiling and art
Sundy Maurice, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, France
P21 An updated DNA barcoding tool for Aloe vera and related CITES-regulated species: Using botanical collections from Kew and beyond
Yannick Woudstra, Stockholm University, Sweden
P22 With or without digitised data: Comparing herbarium workflows for DNA sampling efficiency and specimen conservation and preservation
Freya Cornwell-Davison, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P23 Optimising molecular laboratory protocols for sequencing historical fungal collections: Findings from the Fungarium Sequencing Project
Denise Patel, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P24 Optimising whole genome assembly from historical fungarium specimens
Wu Huang, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P25 The uses of preserved specimens as tools for authentication and innovation in R&D
Gabin Bitchagno, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P26 Searching for the Cyclops: Finding local endemics to support TIPAs work in New Guinea using digitised specimens
Laura Jennings, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P27 Small herbaria and big stories: Assessing the value and vulnerability of small regional herbaria in the southern Western Ghats, India
Ananthapadmanaban Karthikeyan, Madurai Kamaraj University, India
P28 Digitised herbarium data reshape our understanding of invasive plants in the Celtic Fringe
Claudia González-Toral, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P29 Two hundred years of changes in orchid pollination revealed using Kew’s herbarium specimens
Carlos Martel, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P30 Unveiling sources of tree genetic diversity in the UK by exploring the digital information of seed bank collections
Efisio Mattana, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P31 How digitisation of herbaria reveals the botanical legacy of the First World War
Christopher Kreuzer, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P32 Giving a face to the name: Linking legacy and new fungal collections in South American Cortinarius (Basidiomycota)
Lesley Huymann, University Innsbruck, Austria
P33 Digitisation as archival intermediary: Quantifying and qualifying Greta B. Stevenson’s mycological collector networks
Nathan Smith, Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, UK
P34 From digitised specimen data to spatial prioritisation for threatened tree species
Oladimeji Salako, Botanic Gardens Conservation International, UK
P35 From biodiversity to conservation: Identifying key areas in the Cerrado based on the distribution of endemic legumes
Juliana Gastaldello Rando, Universidade Federal do Oeste da Bahia, Brazil
P36 Untangling the taxonomy of Rubus species of Central America and the Caribbean with digitised herbarium specimens
Sofía Lara-Guerrero, University of Bonn, Germany
P37 Foliar spectroscopy for the identification of Amazonian hyperdominant genera
Claire Teakle, University of Liverpool, UK
P38 The AMUNATCOLL IT system: Virtual collections, field application and spatial data analyses
Justyna Wiland-Szymańska, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland
P39 Spatial phylogenetics of the Colorado vascular flora: Biodiversity hotspots, phylogenetic endemism and climate change vulnerability in a topographically complex Rocky Mountain state
Molly Nepokroeff, Denver Botanic Gardens, USA
P40 Digitised herbarium records uncover land-use impacts on genus Calydorea Herb. (Iridaceae)
Julia Gabriele Dani, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
P41 Toward a unified framework to infer species extinction probability from occurrence data
Naomi Witts, Stockholm University, Sweden
P42 Endangered beauty: The Iridaceae from subtropical grasslands in South America under threat
Emanuel Scherdien, University of Reading, UK
P43 The Digital Pharmacopeia of Ethiopia: Mapping medicinal plant vulnerability through herbarium digitisation
Fasil Yalew Sendeke, Common Vision for Development Association (CVDA), Ethiopia
P44 AI-based prediction of herbarium sequencing success across the plant tree of life
Francesco Dal Grande, University of Padua, Italy
P45 Building ecologically intelligent AI by digitising living plants and animals at Kew Gardens
Ian McFadden, Queen Mary University of London, UK
P46 How can digitised specimen data power artificial intelligence to overcome challenges in the long-term maintenance of in vitro exceptional plant species collections?
Viloshanie Reddy, Parks, Recreation and Culture, eThekwini Municipality, South Africa
P47 Large language models unveil floras as critical sources of plant traits
Peng Sun, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Leiden University, Netherlands
P48 Quantifying pollen and spore morphology using a large language model
Luke Mander, The Open University, UK
P49 Finding resilient plants using digital collections: Can machine learning be used to increase our garden planting palette?
Jordan Bilsborrow, Royal Horticultural Society, UK
P50 Computer vision species identification of lichens and bryophytes from biocrusts in Australian drylands
Cecile Gueidan, Australian National Herbarium, CSIRO, Australia
P51 From pixels to phenotypes: Unlocking morphological trends in herbarium specimens using machine learning
Kane Lindsay, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK
P52 A federated framework for provenance, access and benefit-sharing in specimen-linked digital sequence information
Mitch Wolfe, Fairfield Bio, USA & Singapore
