EDINBURGH’S botanic garden’s project to digitise its herbarium collection is celebrating a major milestone with the digitisation of its one millionth specimen.
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s (RBGE) digitisation project aims to make data visible on an accessible platform for the public and scientists.
The garden’s herbarium is home to species from 157 countries which has been historically hard to access.
The collection traces back 350 years and is being digitised into high-resolution images that can be viewed by anyone with an internet connection.
It aims to demonstrate Scotland’s biodiversity but also details regions around the world where RBGE has worked in partnership with local experts for generations.
The digitised platform, which showcases the plants’ lineages sees requests for access come in from across the globe from students, scientists and plant enthusiasts.
The herbarium holds a growing collection of more than three million specimens with stereocaulon vesuvianum becoming the one millionth to be digitised by RGBE.
The specimen, which is a species of lichen, was collected by Dr Rebecca Yahr during an expedition up Ben Nevis in August 2021, to mark 250 years since the first recorded climb up the mountain.
The expedition was part of RBGE’s contribution to the Darwin Tree of Life project, a genome-sequencing programme aimed at unlocking DNA sequences of all the species in Great Britain and Ireland.
This is part of a collaborative effort with partner organisations such as the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh.
The collaboration aims to trace the plants’ ancestry to try and uncover insight into how life on Earth has evolved as well as how to support global biodiversity conservation efforts.
Rebecca Yahr, RBGE lichenologist, said: “Scotland has an important role in international conservation, particularly for lichens.
“Celebrating the milestone with this important specimen is an exciting opportunity for us to highlight Scotland’s unique biodiversity and extend RBGE’s mission to research and understand lichens more generally.”
As part of the celebrations RGBE invited the secondary summer club, a group of 15–18-year-olds, to get behind-the-scenes access to the digitisation process of the millionth specimen.
Closer to the community, the Garden’s Secondary Summer School had the opportunity to engage with the living collection as part of the garden’s attempts to spark their curiosity in career paths within the industry.
The idea behind democratising access to reference collections, like the one at RBBE, is to provide scientists around the globe with access to information that can aid conservation efforts.
Professor Olwen Grace, deputy director of science and curator of the herbarium, said: “Being able to share this information with scientific communities, as well as the public, allows us to develop a more robust understanding of biodiversity challenges.
“As biodiversity scientists, it’s both the best and worst time for us to be working.
“It is far easier to share and translate our work on plant lineages to produce models that demonstrate direct impacts and help us tackle problems at national and global scales.
“However, the acceleration of climate change means that we are in a race against time.
“At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, we see it as our moral imperative to share this information, especially when we are facing a global biodiversity crisis.”
As part of the garden’s attempts to build a future for biodiversity and provide access to the collection that represents half to two-thirds of the world’s flora, the digitisation process has followed the ‘FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship’.
This has ensured the data has been standardised in terms of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of digital assets
