Propagation Protocols at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh | April Coffee Chat 2024

In the summer of 2023, we gathered some of the best nursery managers in the world together as a working group to share their propagation protocols, configurations, and workflows. The Propagation Protocol Working Group article covers these discussions and case studies from individual gardens. The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh was one of those gardens and we asked them to share again with the larger IrisBG Community at the April Coffee Chat.  We hope you find their work as inspiring as we do. 

Thanks to all of you who joined us! The Coffee Chat attendees more experienced users with 5% of the users identifying as novice, 76% intermediate users, and 19% advanced users.
We also asked how many of the attendees on the call were recording propagation data? Fifty-five percent said yes and 45% said no.

The map below shows the gardens and arboreta represented by those who registered for the Coffee Chat - home offices not taken into consideration.

Q&A

Q:  What are the best ways to tell a story about plants from data exported from IrisBG?

A:  Within IrisBG the Item History tab is very useful but tracking data from older database systems can be difficult.  The codes need to match to be useful.

Q:  How do you tell the story of an accession after it leaves the nursery?

A:  The accession number stays the same but the item becomes a new item type: planting. See the code lists and sample plant record below with the changes in item type over time. 

Q: How is taxonomic verification handled at the RGBE?

A: The RBGE is one of the contributors to the World Flora Online.  We have an enormous excel spreadsheet that serves as collecting book to our botanists while they are on collection trips.  They have something to start with while in the field and then once the plant flowers the verification process in IrisBG can be used to refine the specific epithet given.

Q: You mentioned the use of NFC Tags while in remote areas to find plants. A question for IrisBG, can this technology be used with the new IrisBG - ArcGIS Sync and Field Maps?

A: Field Maps can be configured to use both NFC and RFID readers.  See more in this ESRI article that shows how to configure Field Maps for using Bar Codes, QR Codes, and RFID scanners.