#plantspecimens — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #plantspecimens, aggregated by home.social.
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University of Illinois Chicago: Pressed plants reveal living genetic messages, decades later . “In a new study, researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago extracted viable RNA, the essential messenger of genetic information, from plants from museum collections. This research breakthrough will make it possible for scientists to study plant evolution, gene regulation and adaptation using […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/05/23/university-of-illinois-chicago-pressed-plants-reveal-living-genetic-messages-decades-later/ -
Macquarie University: Turning over a new leaf: Macquarie’s rare plant collection goes digital . “A new Atlas of Living Australia grant will help digitise 16,000 plant specimens at Macquarie University, filling critical gaps in national biodiversity data and making rare species records accessible to researchers worldwide.”
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/01/22/turning-over-a-new-leaf-macquaries-rare-plant-collection-goes-digital-macquarie-university/ -
Digital Repository of Ireland: New Collection in DRI – The National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection of Irish plants . “The complete collection contains some 20,000 samples of plant products, including fruits, seeds, wood, fibres, plant extracts, and artefacts. At present, the National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection in the DRI Repository has digitally preserved over 5,000 […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/01/21/digital-repository-of-ireland-new-collection-in-dri-the-national-herbarium-of-ireland-digital-collection-of-irish-plants/ -
Digital Repository of Ireland: New Collection in DRI – The National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection of Irish plants . “The complete collection contains some 20,000 samples of plant products, including fruits, seeds, wood, fibres, plant extracts, and artefacts. At present, the National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection in the DRI Repository has digitally preserved over 5,000 […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/01/21/digital-repository-of-ireland-new-collection-in-dri-the-national-herbarium-of-ireland-digital-collection-of-irish-plants/ -
Digital Repository of Ireland: New Collection in DRI – The National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection of Irish plants . “The complete collection contains some 20,000 samples of plant products, including fruits, seeds, wood, fibres, plant extracts, and artefacts. At present, the National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection in the DRI Repository has digitally preserved over 5,000 […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/01/21/digital-repository-of-ireland-new-collection-in-dri-the-national-herbarium-of-ireland-digital-collection-of-irish-plants/ -
Digital Repository of Ireland: New Collection in DRI – The National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection of Irish plants . “The complete collection contains some 20,000 samples of plant products, including fruits, seeds, wood, fibres, plant extracts, and artefacts. At present, the National Herbarium of Ireland digital collection in the DRI Repository has digitally preserved over 5,000 […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/01/21/digital-repository-of-ireland-new-collection-in-dri-the-national-herbarium-of-ireland-digital-collection-of-irish-plants/ -
University of Cambridge: World’s vast plant knowledge not being fully exploited to tackle biodiversity and climate challenges, warn researchers. “In a new report published today in the journal Nature Plants, researchers based at more than 50 botanic gardens and living plant collections warn that a patchwork of incompatible, or even absent, data systems is undermining global science and […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/01/11/university-of-cambridge-worlds-vast-plant-knowledge-not-being-fully-exploited-to-tackle-biodiversity-and-climate-challenges-warn-researchers/ -
University of North Carolina: UNC-Chapel Hill study shows AI can dramatically speed up digitizing natural history collections. “A new study from UNC-Chapel Hill researchers shows that advanced artificial intelligence tools, specifically large language models (LLMs), can accurately determine the locations where plant specimens were originally collected, a process known as georeferencing. This […]
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Straits Times: Watch the making of S-E Asia’s largest digital plant database at Singapore Botanic Gardens. “At the Singapore Botanic Gardens, visitors can now watch botanists painstakingly build a digital database of some 800,000 specimens from South-east Asia and beyond. From a viewing gallery, they can observe the plants being unpacked, barcoded, placed on a conveyor belt and photographed […]
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UC San Diego: Ellen Browning Scripps Herbarium Collection Highlights the Intersection Between Art and Science . “The Smith Seaweed Ecology Lab at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography is showcasing the scientific diversity and natural beauty of seaweeds through the new Ellen Browning Scripps Herbarium Collection. This resource — a digitized and physical collection of thousands […]
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Smithsonian Institution: Smithsonian Digitizes Pollen From 18,000 Plant Species. “A team of researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute is digitizing images of pollen from more than18,000 plant species from the tropics. These images are being used to train a machine-learning model to identify pollen grains, a job that usually takes hundreds of hours of microscopy work by pollen […]
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Smithsonian Institution: Smithsonian Digitizes Pollen From 18,000 Plant Species. “A team of researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute is digitizing images of pollen from more than18,000 plant species from the tropics. These images are being used to train a machine-learning model to identify pollen grains, a job that usually takes hundreds of hours of microscopy work by pollen […]
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College of Southern Nevada: Preserving the Past, Plant by Plant. “Thanks to a partnership with Clark County and funding through the Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan, CSN has completed the digitization of more than 8,800 plant specimens from the Wesley E. Niles Herbarium.”
https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/21/college-of-southern-nevada-preserving-the-past-plant-by-plant/
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University of Maine: Meireles to illuminate centuries of biodiversity data with $1M award from NSF. “For his project, [Professor Jose Eduardo] Meireles’ will develop and disseminate cutting-edge techniques to collect functional data from preserved plant specimens. It will ultimately unlock centuries of untapped data from 390 million specimens held in herbarium collections around the world.”
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CBS News: Project aims to digitize 2.3 million plants at California Academy of Sciences. “There is quite the photo shoot happening right now in Golden Gate Park, but instead of models, the muse of choice is a collection of leaves, branches, and dried flowers. This year, the California Academy of Sciences hopes to digitize its entire global botany collection that stretches back to the 17th […]