A New Approach to Targeting Verifications at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

Abstract

Verification is the process of identifying and accurately naming the plants in the Living Collections. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) has had a well organised system for verifying plants in place for many years but, despite this, only 26% of the Living Collections has been verified. The process is slow and time consuming and is biased towards groups and geographical areas in which Garden staff have a research interest. In the last two years, however, a new, more targeted approach to verification, to run in tandem with the existing system, has been developed that is more timeefficient. With this approach herbarium material is collected for each accession and the whole group is verified in one intensive session. Trial runs have been conducted on Alnus and Acer to great effect and further tests are being conducted on Mahonia and Spiraea.