This presentation tells the successful story of volunteers recording the Melton Botanic Garden extensive plant collection into a professional botanical database to help understand its current collection, plan for the future, know what species are IUNC classified and making the collection information and garden features publicly available through the internet.
Friends of the Melton Botanic Garden is a wholly volunteer organisation with limited funds, operating on 27ha of Council owned land. The Friends are maintaining, developing and enhancing the botanic garden.
The Friends have brought together a disparate set of plant collection records into the professional botanic database, IrisBG. The presentation covers the selection, resourcing, training, conversion and procedures to establish a records collection management system through to releasing the information to the public. The lessons learnt and the successes and difficulties are covered.
Moving the records into IrisBG has helped understand the range of plants, location, rarity and conservation values of the collection. A number of species, especially in the indigenous plant collections are rare and endangered in the wild. In 2022, the addition of the Garden Explorer website has provided public access to the data and garden features. This enhances the visitor experience and education about of the collection.
Learning objectives:
• Understanding your plants
• Enhancing the visitor experience
• What volunteers can achieve