Category: SciencePage 35 of 37
Latest science blog posts from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
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/.
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…
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…
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 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…
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 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…
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…
A step-by-step guide to adding images to the RBGE collections image management system.
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,…
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…
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…