Decades of botanical observations of our vital wild plants are trapped in paper records and archives - through the efforts of volunteers and citizen scientists, we'll transform this inaccessible data into crucial evidence for conserving rare species, restoring habitats, and combating climate change.
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We know that tens of thousands of plant records are currently locked away in paper records, archives, and historical works, unavailable to guide conservation action. Past generations of botanists spent countless hours collecting and cataloguing these records to record the world as they found it, but they aren’t currently accessible to contribute to our understanding of how our flora is changing, leaving both conservationists and the public more poorly informed about our past natural wealth.
The BSBI is the biggest, most active organisation devoted to the study of botany in Britain and Ireland, and one of the world’s largest contributors of high quality biological records. To get these data contributing to conservation action, we need to digitise and combine them with our growing data set of over 50 million botanical records. To do this, we will bring together a dedicated team of citizen scientists to migrate these data sets and knit together the picture of our botanical heritage.
