Thank you to all the volunteers who have participated in The RBGE Herbarium: Exploring Gesneriaceae, the African violet family. The project data is now available for reuse. For details, see the Results page. All data is presented in an anonymised form. If you used a Zooniverse account to participate in this project and would like to request for your anonymised data to be deleted, please contact research@nationalarchives.gov.uk
Open up global biodiversity research possibilities by releasing the data held in 300 years of plant specimens
Learn moreEach workflow will ask you to enter information from the labels of herbarium specimens:
Geography (capturing textual information about the country, locality and altitude where the specimen was collected)
Latitude and Longitude (capturing geographical coordinates which enables specimens to be digitally mapped to a point location).
This is one of the new indexed projects on Zooniverse, where you can choose which subjects you want to transcribe.
For more information on how this works see the project FAQ
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The RBGE Herbarium: Exploring Gesneriaceae, the African violet family Statistics
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Message from the researcher
The Gesneriaceae are a family of tropical herbs and shrubs that are of great ecological importance, many of which are under threat from habitat loss. The herbarium collections underpin all of our research; from taxonomy to phylogenetics.
The RBGE Herbarium: Exploring Gesneriaceae, the African violet familyAbout The RBGE Herbarium: Exploring Gesneriaceae, the African violet family
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh's extensive Herbarium collection is estimated to hold three million specimens representing half to two thirds of the worlds flora. Herbarium specimen data helps inform and target conservation and climate change mitigation efforts protecting plant species for future generations. We need your help in transcribing the specimen label data in order to make the digital specimens 'research-ready' for the international research community.
By volunteering on this Zooniverse project, you’ll also be supporting an overarching project that studies how volunteers interact with citizen research projects -- Engaging Crowds: citizen research and heritage data at scale, is part of Towards a National Collection, an £18.9 million Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded programme which launched in 2020. As one of the programme’s foundational projects, this open-source research will benefit society more widely in showing how volunteers interact with projects and how citizens can change the future of research.