Transcribe the Living Collection

The results will be ~4000 transcribed index cards. These will provide a training dataset for the Machine Learning software so that we can successfully transcribe the remaining est. 57 thousand cards in the RBGE card file index.

We will link the data on the cards with the plants that are already in the Edinburgh collections management system (CMS) as living collections.

These data will be useful in many different aspects, spanning husbandry and evolutionary biology.

As to the plant biological research projects, our immediate plan is to use these records to estimate age-specific survival probabilities, and to explore these in light of evolutionary and ecological ancestry contexts, using Bayesian Survival Trajectory Analysis.

The role of time or age and the evolution of senescence constitute an unsolved mystery in biology in general and on a scale of 1 to 10 remains completely unknown for plants (except relatively few species). The results of this project will therefore provide an as of yet globally untapped set of data - individual-level age-specific survival records - that allow to map mortality senescence across a vast proportion of the plant kingdom and allow to a large extent research about morphological, ecological, physical, and - if any - phylogenetic constraints on plant longevity, as we construct our estimates from these husbandry records with known ancestral environments.

For the garden itself, these analyses can act as a management tool, i.e. for prioritization of which individuals to propagate first, given their life expectancy.

Imagine the knowledge we can create about plants’ life expectancies – when we get all these records harnessed. Most of our appreciation of plant lifespan come from anecdotal evidence. We can make a map that nobody has ever seen. We may even get to the bottom of the long-standing question of why organisms age at all.

This citizen science project could eventually be scaled up across more botanic gardens as well as other types of botanical specimen data, such as handwritten curators' notes or dried plant specimens.

Please stay tuned to this page as we post the results of any completed workflow with a measure of how successful we have been with predicting on the remaining archive card cells.