The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s (RBGE) project to digitise its renowned Herbarium collection has reached a significant milestone as it celebrates the digitisation of its one millionth specimen.

The digitisation project aims to bridge the gap between the collection and the public by making data visible on an accessible platform - taking an innovative approach to scientific data sharing. In line with this commitment to empower learners and share their resources, the Garden invited the Expedition Botanics - Secondary Summer Club, a group of 15–18-year-olds with a budding passion for science, to get behind-the-scenes access to the digitisation process of the millionth specimen.

To celebrate the milestone the Herbarium, which holds an ever-growing collection of over three million specimens, RBGE has digitised a specimen of Stereocaulon vesuvianum. The specimen, which is a species of lichen*, was collected by Dr Rebecca Yahr, Lichenologist at the Garden, during an expedition up Ben Nevis to mark 250 years since the first recorded climb up the historic mountain.

The landmark expedition was part of RBGE’s contribution to the Darwin Tree of Life (DToL) project, a groundbreaking genome-sequencing programme aimed at unlocking DNA sequences of all the species in Great Britain and Ireland. By examining plant and fungal lineages and their characteristics, the Garden works collaboratively with partner organisations, including the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh, to reflect on plants’ ancestry – plantcestry – uncovering invaluable insight into how life on Earth has evolved and how we can support global biodiversity conservation efforts.

Rebecca Yahr said: “Scotland has an important role in international conservation, particularly for lichens. Celebrating the milestone with this important specimen is an exciting opportunity for us to highlight Scotland’s unique biodiversity and extend RBGE’s mission to research and understand lichens more generally.”

The Garden’s Herbarium is home to species from 157 countries - an impressive scientific collection which was historically hard to access. The digitised platform, which showcases the rich and diverse plant lineage, now sees requests come in from across the globe from students, scientists and plant enthusiasts alike.

Closer to the community, the Garden’s Secondary Summer School had the opportunity to engage with the living collection as well as apply their learnings to the natural world. One of the lucky youngsters, 15-year-old Bernice Nwagu, was selected to digitise the millionth specimen, highlighting the Garden’s commitment to investing in future generations and sparking their curiosity in career paths within the industry.

The vibrant working collection, which traces back 350 years, is being digitised into high-resolution images that can be viewed by anyone with an internet connection. It demonstrates not only Scotland’s biodiversity but details regions around the world where RBGE has worked in partnership with local experts for generations.

Democratising access to reference collections such as the Garden’s provides scientists around the globe with an enriched understanding of the environment in their quest to conserve our fragile habitats.

Leading the digitisation project, Professor Olwen Grace, Deputy Director of Science (Collection) and Curator of the Herbarium said: “Being able to share this information with scientific communities as well as the public allows us to develop a more robust understanding of biodiversity challenges and the solutions that can help us build resilience to shifting climates.

“As biodiversity scientists, it’s both the best and worst time for us to be working. It is far easier to share and translate our work on plant lineages to produce models that demonstrate direct impacts and help us tackle problems at national and global scales; however, the acceleration of climate change means that we are in a race against time.

“At the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, we see it as our moral imperative to share this information, especially when we are facing a global biodiversity crisis.”

As part of the Garden’s commitment to building a positive future for biodiversity and providing access to the collection that represents half to two-thirds of the world’s flora, the digitisation process has followed the ‘FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship’. This has ensured the data has been standardised in terms of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of digital assets.