star Be part of April 1–30! star
Come and spend an afternoon with us at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Herbarium as part of the Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections (WeDigBio)! WeDigBio is a global event that engages and connects people online and onsite in digitising natural history collections. What will you be doing? You will be transcribing collection information from our herbarium specimens whilst interacting with other institutions across the globe through the WeDigBio website: https://wedigbio.org What are herbarium specimens? Herbarium specimens consist of pressed plants mounted on archival card and are used to identify new species, establish their global distributions and explore their evolutionary relationships. This research helps to provide an essential baseline for the development of conservation strategies and other disciplines, e.g. pharmaceutical research. Why is label transcription important? Capturing this information digitally allows researchers to build a picture of a species’ historical and current distribution; to see if any changes have occurred such as a decline in numbers. Specimen collection label data may also provide clues to help explain these changes, for example, habitat loss over time. Thus digitisation helps inform and target conservation efforts protecting plant species for future generations! A unique opportunity… To help you experience how this event fits into the bigger picture, we will be taking you on a behind the scenes tour of the herbarium, as well as providing an interactive session with one of our botanical researchers. Due to the nature of the tasks involved in the event we ask that participants are aged 16 and above.