Past, present and future systems for plant recording in The National Trust

A presentation by Franklyn Tancock, Plant Collections Curator, National Trust, at CILIP in London.

Franklyn Tancock’s career has ranged from the National Trust to private gardens, from market gardening to ornamental gardening, and from Devon to Scotland. He is ideally placed to be the National Trust’s Plant Collections Curator and the man responsible for the introduction of new computer based recording methods.

The National Trust (NT) has grown spectacularly in the years since the 1950s, with property and garden acquisition that must be unprecedented since the dissolution of the monasteries. The NT now has in its care 133 listed properties. These have been acquired because of their historical associations, their architectural significance, the importance of their gardens, or all three.

Plant cataloguing began at the NT in 1976 with the Conifer Survey. The gardeners were issued with paper forms, showing the garden divided into sections on which the species present and any changes made could be recorded. The system was a Paradox database, which generated enormous report matrices and queries were a major exercise. All the computing was undertaken centrally, input and output was all on the basis of paper forms and reports.

In 2003 the National Council for the Conservation of Plants (now Plant Heritage) gained lottery funding for a database for their national collections. The NT invested in the scheme to produce the Demeter database. The large number of fields, and the fact that the database could not be networked led to a desire to streamline the system.

Franklyn Tancock was given a 12 months secondment to work with IT staff to produce a revised database. This involved reducing the content to some 30 to 35 fields per plant. International standards of data transfer were implemented and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) plant finder was used as the authority for establishing plant names. The data is based on a hierarchy of garden areas. This system now hosts 130,000 records. Records can be unlinked for correction and can be propagated to create child records. Plant accession numbers are used to generate tag numbers (to be attached to the plants themselves). An intranet version is available for all staff, although it works slowly, and is searchable by location and by plant. Reports are pre-defined and pre-generated by Discoverer software from outside the database, and can be made available on paper. The system was designed for 1 million records.

The database is a management tool. Priority plant propagation as part of the plant conservation program is one undertaking. Another project is the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew, where seeds of authenticated species are stored. Lastly the RHS want herbarium specimens of known first introductions of garden plants to act as a standard and control for future nomenclature and identification. These are all part of a global strategy for plant conservation. One important feature is that the value of the plants can be recorded – an original introduction or a veteran tree for example

The Yorkshire Bank has given £1.5m over 3 years for the project. £450,000 is for plant recording: photographing and identifying plants at 80 properties over 3 years, and employing both contractors and volunteers.The funding has provided for the use of sophisticated GIS technology, where a range finder can be linked to a Magellan GPS machine to accurately log the position of a plant, with the complete database available on that machine.. From this data a map can be produced, which can reveal details of the plantings. These surveys can also be linked with aerial photographs. 22 GPS machines are in use, 2 in each NT region and 20 volunteers are involved in data inputting.

Currently the Chicago Botanic Garden has invited the NT to be its European partner in an extended worldwide system, using Google Earth. This Oracle database will be usable in real time to manage the plant collections.

Registered users can choose from a drop down list of gardens and all this information can be entered on a single page. Plants which are not in the RHS system, usually plants not available commercially, can be added by the user. There is a GIS browser which will be useful for overall property management, and plants can be added via this module.

The system will deliver an inventory of the NT’s plant assets; better plant management; better achievement of conservation needs; planning facilities for replenishment of aged stock; easier addition of new specimens. It will be available to a wider audience and promote dialogue in the areas of identification and nomenclature, and the sharing of knowledge. It should widen engagement with the NT’s plant collections.

771 words

Dinosaur necks

The tail of the Diplodocus at the NHM has gone up and down over the years depending on whether it was a sluggish reptilian failure due to be replaced with the new mammal model. or a hot blooded cutting edge innovation in herbivory.

Now the neck is following the tail.

I wonder if the angle of elevation of the extremities of the beast reflect the FTSE in some arcane way?