Complete British and Irish plant catalogue at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Twinflower (Linnaea borealis) Herbarium specimen © Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

The catalogue is now complete for the British and Irish plant specimens in the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE).

The Herbarium at RBGE is one of the leading natural history collections of plant and fungi specimens. It holds about 3 million specimens of plants and fungi from across the world and covers a timespan of over 300 years – the oldest specimen dating from 1697 – and it continues to receive up to 30,000 specimens each year.

As the National Collection for Scotland, the Herbarium holds the most comprehensive collection of Scottish plants and fungi, and a significant collection of British and Irish plant and fungi specimens. This includes 150,000 vascular plant specimens from Britain and Ireland, of which nearly two thirds are imaged and online. The Herbarium is now focusing on the digitisation of the plant allies – mosses, ferns, fungi and lichens – with optimised protocols to deal with these more complex specimens.

The Herbarium is used by researchers around the world. Herbarium specimens are the primary source of geographical data used to build our current understanding of global biodiversity and how it changes over time. These biological specimens provide a wealth of additional information, including digital sequence information (DSI), which is used to understand the tree of life and the evolution of traits of interest in applications as diverse as crop enhancement, carbon capture and medicine discovery.

RBGE’s mission is to explore, conserve and explain the world of plants. Digitising the specimens unlocks the collection and makes them available to anyone, anywhere. About a third of the RBGE’s Herbarium is already available online, and they recently reached a major milestone with one million specimens digitised. Completing the digitisation of the Herbarium is a major strategic objective for RBGE to ensure that its collections are accessible for use in this decade of biodiversity.

All the specimen data and images can be accessed freely on the RBGE Herbarium Catalogue. They are also available on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), from the DiSSCo UK portal and from the NBN Atlas.

This biodiversity data story was shared by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh with the Better Biodiversity Data project, led and managed by the NBN Trust and supported by NatureScot and The Scottish Government.