Public garden living collections are dynamic and often the best efforts of plant recorders cannot keep pace with the volume of new arrivals, transplants, propagation, phenology observations, and removals. An informal study at Chicago Botanic Garden (CBG) in the late 1990s identified a gap in time between when plants arrive and were planted versus when new accession forms were filled out and submitted to the plant recorder. Unfortunately, data submitted months later was often inaccurate, incomplete, or simply not submitted resulting in orphaned plants with no provenance data. In response, CBG created an electronic database (Plant Requisition System), which resulted in improvement in accuracy and reduction in time, improving the quality of the data in the Plant Records database.
Presenter: B. Tankersley, Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, Illinois
