Category: SciencePage 35 of 36

Latest science blog posts from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

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…

Mark and Colin meet the President of Nepal

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…

Finding faster ways to enter minimal data for herbarium specimens

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…

RBGE data in new Europeana iPad App

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…

Moving forward from ash dieback

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….

Soprano Soars at Edinburgh Botanics

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….

Learning from ash dieback

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…

Exploring extinction risk in plants

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…

Sparkling additions in the Molecular Lab

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…

Wallich Catalogue: Herb. Hb. & H.

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…

An odd way to lose Biodiversity

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…

Botanics Holds Triple Celebration

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 OpenUp! Project – making RBGEs collections available through the European Cultural Portal.

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…