Category: SciencePage 31 of 33

Latest science blog posts from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

The Amazon, the Andes and the Himalaya. 2nd year PhD posters

As part of a PhD programme in the School of Biological Sciences at Edinburgh University students are expected to create and present a poster at the end of their 2nd…

The Top Secret Botanics Apps!

Like a lot of jobs working in software development can be depressing as you are continually dealing with things that have gone wrong and rarely dwell on the…

Wallich Catalogue: Sylhet, Pundua & Khasia Hills

Sylhet is frequently given as a collection locality in the Wallich Catalogue, but although this is a major town of NE Bangladesh, there are dangers in mechanically ascribing…

Old Woody Fibre and His Alpine Grass

There is so much in the news about loss of biodiversity, and species going extinct, that it is pleasant to be able to report a contrary piece of…

Kinky Palms

The historical RBGE Illustrations Collection contains a wealth of images from a wide variety of sources – from original drawings to newspaper cuttings. Information on the source was…

Another Small Cog In The Biodiversity Informatics Machine

There is a running joke in the 1990’s sitcom Friends that no one quite understands what Chandler Bing does for a living. They know it is “something to…

Edinburgh’s Garden: Past to Present

The new display in the Library Foyer provides a whistle-stop tour of the history of the Garden with illustrations from the Library and Archive collections of plants that…

Wallich Catalogue: Supplemental difficulties with thorn apples

In order to maximise the scientific impact of Herbarium of the East India Company, Wallich enlisted the help of a network of European botanists to work on the…

Figuring out your Tree

Part 1: The Very Basics The analyses are finally over, you can fill in those blanks in the results section, and really start dealing with all those hypotheses…

James (Jimmy) Ratter Collection labels available online.

As part of the work of the OpenUp! Project, scans of labels from plant collections made by Jimmy Ratter are now available online at http://rbg-web2.rbge.org.uk/Ratter_labels/.

Crop wild relatives need conservation

A global survey has identified major gaps in our collections of wild species related to crops. The survey found that more than half of the 455 Crop Wild…

Of Botanists and Brooms

Taxonomic botanists are curious creatures. And I mean this in two ways – not only being (frequently) curious in themselves, but, of necessity for their work, possessed of…

Slimey Aliens in the Glasshouses

During the recent BioBlitz mollusc specialist Adrian Sumner discovered an alien snail, Zonitoides arboreus, in the RBGE glasshouses. The diminutive snail, just 5mm across, lives as a wild…

George Don sr. (1764-1814)

George Don spent much of his life exploring the corries and glens of Angus and further afield to Arran, Ben Nevis and Skye.  His plant collections in the…

Rhomoo Lepcha

Lepchas are indigenous peoples to Sikkim, renowned for their knowledge of and respect for nature. Several Lepcha were employed as collectors by the Calcutta Botanic Garden. Rhomoo Lepcha…

Roland Edgar Cooper (1890-1962)

Roland Edgar Cooper was born in 1890 and orphaned at an early age. Once he turned sixteen he came under the guardianship of his aunt Emma Smith, his…

BioBlitz total hits 444 species

For 24 hours from 6pm on the 21st June experts and the public joined forces to record wild species in the Garden at Inverleith as part of the…

RBGE Collections Image Uploader – Instructions.

A step-by-step guide  to adding images to the RBGE collections  image management system.

Botanics Welcomes Korean Visitors

I was pleased to be able to entertain a party of five visitors from South Korea yesterday: Seok Young Kim,  Ryu jae wook, Kim Taeho, Kyu S. Oh,…

Stable Identifiers for Specimens Workshop

On the 4th & 5th of June 2013 we held a workshop at the Botanics on using stable HTTP URIs (sometimes called URLs) for specimens. This was the…