‘Zombie spiders' in Fungarium

“ZOMBIE spiders’ and Darwin’s HMS Beagle collection are among the fungi being digitally archived by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

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Kew’s Fungarium, an archive beneath the west London garden, is one of the world’s biggest and most important collections of fungal diversity, containing more than 1.1 million specimens collected over the past 175 years.

Teams have been creating high resolution images, transcribing the data and uploading it onto Kew's data portal, which grants researchers worldwide remote access to the collection.

The specimens are georeferenced and span decades, meaning experts can observe how a species’ range has changed over time, helping to inform conservation plans.

Kew scientists have also been tapping into the genetic information stored in the Fungarium’s 50,000 type specimens.

The project, which is a partnership with the National History Museum and is backed by Government funding, aims to sequence about 7,000 of these fungi, making the data publicly available online in the coming years.