Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Digitisation is carried out on a HerbScan scanner, developed at RBG Kew. These scanners are adapted work upside down with a rising flatbed mechanism that brings the specimen up to the scanning surface. This helps to prevent damage to the specimen as we do not need to turn the specimen upside down.
In addition to African herbarium specimens we have also digitised related material that will be of benefit to researchers and students worldwide.
- Herbarium specimens
- Slides and digital photographs of wild collections and the corresponding herbarium specimens
- Flora of Soqotra and the collections of Sir Isaac Bailey Balfour
- The sketchbook of Mungo Park
- Illustrations of dissections and the corresponding herbarium specimens
- The guide to the collections of Jean Francois Drège
Herbarium specimens
The areas included in API are all of continental Africa as well as North Atlantic Islands, St Helena and Ascension Islands, Madagascar and other Indian Ocean
Islands. We have digitised all of our herbarium angiosperm specimens from these regions, amounting to over 3000 specimens, as well as our bryophyte collections including mosses, liverworts and hornworts.
Slides and digital photographs of wild collections and the corresponding herbarum specimens
At RBGE we have an extensive slide collection which, while interesting in itself, can be made much more valuable by linking them with a data rich herbarium specimen. This allows both specimens and slides to be examined and verified at the same time. Also, in the long term any name changes to the plant will be tracked by the data attached to the specimens. For slides which are not attached to specimens, there is no easy way to keep up with name changes.
Collecting has evolved to include digital photography so we have also linked digital photographs of African plants collected in the wild with their herbarium specimens.
The photographs selected were all taken during recent expeditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Gabon and Cameroon by Dr. David Harris, Curator of the Herbarium at RBGE.
Flora of Soqotra and the collections of Sir Isaac Bailey Balfour
The island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen has 825 species of vascular plants, of which 307 are endemic. The island has been visited by botanists from Edinburgh for over a hundred years and we have archives of the original field notes, maps and drawings of the first visits as well as specimens of many of the species.
Sir Isaac Bailey Balfour (RBGE Regius Keeper, 1888-1922) collected around 500 plants from Soqotra in 1880, including over 300 new species. We have digitised a historically important specimen collected by Sir Isaac Bailey Balfour for every species where available, as well as a more recent data-rich specimen.
We have digitised 100 plates from Sir Isaac Bailey Balfour's Botany of Socotra in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Volume XXXI.
The Sketchbook of Mungo Park (1795)
The RBGE library contains the special botanical sketchbook of Mungo Park (1771-1805), the first British explorer to journey into West Africa. We have digitised and attempted to apply accepted names to the fifty-three sketches in this book.
On 21st June 1795 Mungo Park journeyed up the Gambia River and on the 5th of July arrived at Pisania, where he was accommodated by a Dr. Laidley. Pisania was a small village established as a British trading post now called Karantaba which is located approximately 200 miles up the Gambia river and 20 km east of Janjangbureh (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Whilst there Park contracted a fever and was incapacitated.
It was during his convalescence that Park undertook the fifty three sketches that comprise the sketch book now housed in the RBGE Library. The first two sketches are of a turtle and a bat and the remaining fifty one are botanical. The majority of the sketches have been given botanical names and bear the signature D. Oliver. It is likely that this is Daniel Oliver (1830-1916) keeper of the herbarium and library at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (1864-1890) who was also responsible for the first three volumes of the Flora of Tropical Africa.
Illustrations of dissections and the corresponding herbarium specimens
Illustrations of dissections made from herbarium specimens are rarely available for taxonomists and are very useful for future research.
We have digitised over 50 drawings of dissections and the corresponding specimens. All the dissections were made during the preparation of the monograph "The Manuleae: a tribe of Scrophulariceae" (1994) by O.M. Hilliard.
The guide to the collections of Jean Francois Drège
Jean Francois Drège (1794-1881) was a prolific collector of plants in South Africa. In total he collected over 200 000 specimens from approximately 8 000 species. Drège recorded his collections in Zwei Pflanzengeographische Documente (Leipzig 1843). This reference can be confusing to interpret as Drège lists his specimens alphabetically with cross references to coded localities and RBGE has a guide to decoding the reference which is to be published. We have digitised Zwei Pflanzengeographische Documente in an effort to make information about Drège's specimens more accessible.