Category: SciencePage 32 of 33
Latest science blog posts from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Yesterday Mark Watson and Colin Pendry met the President of Nepal, Ram Baran Yadav, at the President’s Office in Shital Niwas, Kathmandu. During the one-hour meeting Mark and…
There are nearly 3 million specimens being held in the herbarium at RBGE. We are working to digitise these specimens to make them available to people around the…
The RBGE Collection images have been chosen as part of the initial dataset for the newly launched Europeana’s first free iPad app. ‘Europeana Open Culture’ introduces you to…
Disease is a normal part of nature. But in recent years there has been a considerable increase in the number of new pests and diseases affecting Scottish trees….
Local bat experts released a Soprano Pipistrelle bat, Pipistrellus pygmaeus, in the Garden on Saturday 11th May. The bat had been discovered by Robert Unwin on 12th April….
Resilience noun [mass noun] 1 the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity 2 the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness [Oxford…
Identifying traits that make organisms prone to extinction is an important question in conservation biology. Studies thus far have focused on extinction risks in vertebrates, but we know…
It’s a confusing world out there – betaine, DMSO, bovine serum albumin (BSA), trehalose, glycerol, formamide – the list of things that you can throw into a PCR…
Throughout his catalogue of the East India Company Herbarium, Nathaniel Wallich makes reference to herbarium collections by using the abbreviations ‘Herb.’, ‘Hb.’ or simply ‘H.’ The clues to…
As part of my project for the Flora of Nepal I am revising the species of Clematis and the closely related genus Naravelia that occur there. I spend…
A triple celebration was held in the herbarium today, Thursday 14th March 2013, for three members of staff who have recently had their work recognized. From left to…
The aim of the OpenUp! Project is to increase access to natural history collections by providing multimedia content (images, videos etc) to Europeana, a portal to the cultural…
Mark Watson has been awarded the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society’s Dr Patrick Neill Medal 2013 for his contribution to botany. Mark Watson is Editor in Chief of the…
A Rhododendron collected in Malaysia in 2010 by RBGE scientist Dr Peter Wilkie has been described as new by colleagues at the Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM). Rhododendron…
Last year (2012) a RBGE HND/BSc2 Horticulture Student called Nicolas Porter undertook a project on Armillaria (Honey Fungus) at Inverleith. He identified a number of factors that may…
Since August 2012 Boris (Boriss) Lariushin has been prolifically publishing a series of illustrated botanical monographs on major plant families. The problem is that these books are plagiarised…
I’m just back from a meeting I attended with Martin Pullan at the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium – hence the picture of the African…
The geographical collecting locality of the types reflect both current and historical geographical areas of interest of RBGE research. Historical areas of focus are China (20%), India (8%)…
The oldest specimen in the herbarium at Edinburgh was collected in 1697. The oldest type specimen was collected in 1730. There have been several peaks during the time…
The type specimens held at RBGE were included in an analysis of plant collectors by Bebber et al. (2012) which showed that 50% of the type specimens were…