Category: InformaticsPage 1 of 2

Handling information about plants.

Why latin names just aren’t good enough anymore

This is the second post in a series about the Taxon Name Linking Service project. The process of combining biodiversity data from multiple sources currently starts with matching…

TNLS: from Alphabetti-Spaghetti to order?

We are excited to start a new collaboration between the Botanics (RBGE) and Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ). This project forms part of TETTRIs – “Transforming European Taxonomy through…

Workshop invitation: After the crowds disperse: crowdsourced data rediscovered and researched

***Deadline for expressions of interest extended to 30th October 17:00 UTC.*** You put your images in, your data come out – that’s what crowdsourcing’s all about! It sounds…

IUCN Threatened accessions in the RBGE Living Collection as of 20 Jan 2020 (Staff Conference)

Today in the staff conference Simon was asked the number of threatened plants that the RBGE is growing. This is a dynamic figure as plants at the RBGE…

RBGE’s Silica-dried Collections

We have been working towards protocols for the management and storage of the RBGE specimens dried in silica gel. The bulk of this material is collected by RBGE…

Food Security? Try Raspberry Pi!

Often problems are small and solutions simple, but a little bit of tech can make things a lot easier. If we get it right then no one will…

How do the Botanics make you feel?

During the recent Project Soothe exhibition at the Botanics participants were asked to mark on a map of the garden places that Soothed them, Excited them or made…

Stable URIs for natural history collections – The Movie

If you are like me you are probably counting the days to Stars Wars 8: The Last Jedi. Films often seem to take a long time to arrive…

Images now in GBIF

A couple of years ago GBIF started including images for occurrence records in their biodiversity portal.  Last week I was able to add images from our digital repository…

Harvesting Collections for Social Benefit: Hidden Stories at the Herbarium of RBGE

Background to the project. The advent of the era of Big Data has highlighted a truism in scientific discovery: an inference is only as good as the data…

Botanics Nearby: Privacy Policy

Botanics Nearby is an iOS and Android app that helps you learn about the things around you on a visit to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. This page…

Actionable, long-term stable and semantic web compatible identifiers for access to biological collection objects

Happy to see our paper on the use of internet technologies to mobilise specimen data finally in “print”. We are hoping this will add traction to the adoption…

How Green Is Edinburgh Really?

I’ve spent the last few days working on the data pipeline I first mentioned in The Cloud Lottery that is Scottish satellite imagery. This pipeline consists of a…

Automated sampling of perceived naturalness across Edinburgh

We instinctively know that a walk in the garden or somewhere else filled with natural beauty is good for us but it is difficult to justify expensive or…

The Cloud Lottery

I’ve been looking at producing a good quality Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) dataset for central Scotland so that I can investigate correlation between green space, biodiversity and…

Zoomable and searchable map of the Herbarium Collections of Martin Gardner in the RBGE (E) herbarium.

The groups and expedition are listed below.

Biophilomatics: A new field courtesy of IKEA?

At the end of last month I spent a Thursday evening at IKEA Edinburgh, not for the usual reason of eating chips in the café with my daughter…

Water of Leith Walkway Audio Tour

This week the Water of Leith Walkway Audio Tour app went live in the Apple iOS app store and the Google Play store. We have produced this in…

CETAF Specimen URI Tester

Back in July 2013 we held a workshop here at RBGE on the use of HTTP URIs (also known as URLs or just plain web addresses) for specimens….

First Audio Leaflet: Dawyck Scottish Trees Trail

Apps Apps Apps For several years now we have been looking for a way to make appropriate use of mobile phones to deliver interpretation material. Smart phones really…