So excited I made a typo in the hashtag #ASBS2025

Slide from digitisation workflow

Slide from digitisation workflow

Slide from digitisation workflow

Slide from digitisation workflow

Just watched a really interesting presentation by Jo Birch on how AI is helping extract data from digitised herbarium specimens. #ASBS2025

Botanist Helen Kennedy presenting at the ASBS2025 conference

*Data cleaning* Helen Kennedy at #ASBS2025 singing from my song book! An important step after digitisation is of course data cleaning.

The third keynote of the #asbs2025 is given by Helen Kennedy from our herbarium. Her topic is stewardship in botany.

The second is awarded to Jeremy Bruhl, emeritus professor at UNE. He is an expert in, among other taxa, Cyperaceae and Phyllanthaceae. The two recipients are giving a shared presentation, reflecting their close collaboration over many years. #asbs2025

Unusually, the ASBS awards two Nancy Burbidge Medals in 2025. The first is awarded to Ian Telford, in honour of his lifetime contributions to Australasian botany. He scientifically described over 100 taxa and collected over 14,000 specimens. #asbs2025

Screenshot of Bionomia, back of head of awardee, during award ceremony.

When you are working on the Nancy Burbidge Medal 2025 awardee's @bionomia.net profile (Dr Ian R. H. Telford) while sitting behind him! #ASBS2025

Katharina Nargar looks back on the Decadal Plan for Taxonomy in Australia, and where to next. #asbs2025

Tim Hammer's second presentation is about the new electronic flora of South Australia. (FloraSA makes sense, but my brain goes "flora essay".) #asbs2025

Tim Collins gives an overview of the data-driven criteria for listing species as threatened. Estimating number of individuals when creating a record, instead of merely writing something like "frequent" or "rare", would be very useful for these assessments. #asbs2025

Question was asked during my presentation about the recording of the "onboarding" #Wiki Webinar we undertook in the run up to #ASBS2025. A recording of that webinar can be found here www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv_T...

Siobhan Leachman encourages participants to contribute to wiki projects. The conference workshop on Sunday was about just that.

She also discusses the correlation between conference poster success and poster location (e.g., right next to the coffee).

#asbs2025

Melinda Laidlaw gives a broad overview of goings-on at the Queensland Herbarium, including staff changes and research priorities. #asbs2025

A session of short updates begins with Peter Jobson discussing how the census of the flora of New South Wales is updated. #asbs2025

Peter Pemberton's final talk of the session is about a species of Homoranthus that is new to science. #asbs2025

Tim Hammer and colleagues compared the Angiosperms 353 and OzBaits v2 target capture approaches in Alismatales. More baits per gene region in OzBaits, but more genes targeted in a353. Combining both datasets produced best concordance scores. #asbs2025

Patrick Fahey revises the taxonomy of Eucalyptus series Subbuxeales. Sparks interesting discussion about the value of recognising subspecies. #asbs2025

Miriam Slodownik introduces us to The Witness Tree Project, a long-term study of tree health using the easy access to botanic gardens and the fact that the gardens cultivate many of the same species across the globe. #asbs2025

"Why did I punish myself with Carex?" asks Millard Uy, who studied the Carex indica clade for his PhD project 😆. #asbs2025

Millicent Oulo is beginning her work on the species-rich sedge genus Lepidosperma. #asbs2025

Rinchen Yangzom presents a species of Pedicularis from Bhutan as new to science and discusses the resulting re-assessment of species boundaries among its relatives. #asbs2025

Tom Carter has us return to palaeobotany, with a presentation on fossil Myrtaceae in part intended to enable better dating of phylogenies in the family. #asbs2025

#asbs2025 continues with lightning talks. Tareg Shaldoom, who is also providing technical support for the meeting, begins with a talk about the Phebalium glandulosum complex in the citrus family. Several putative species revealed; common garden experiment to exclude ecological plasticity.

Robb Eastman-Densem speaks about eucalyps in the recently segregated genus Blakella. Allele phasing to resolve hybridisation in the study group (SORTER2, a software I am not familiar with). Funny animation to visualise recombination. #asbs2025

Many orchid talks this session. Andrew McDougall discusses his preliminary results for Caladenia in South Australia. Phylogenetic analysis of sequence data did not resolve the group, so the next step will be to generate SNP data. #asbs2025

Stephanie Goedderz talks about her PhD project on mycoheterotrophic orchids in Australia, meaning orchids parasitising on fungi instead of doing photosynthesis. One example is the genus Gastrodia. #asbs2025

Consolata Nanjala presents phylogenomic and ancestral range analysis of the Asian and Australasian lineage of the very large orchid genus Bulbophyllum. #asbs2025

Very unusual talk compared to the many phylogenetic, taxonomic, and palaeobotany ones: Emily Hoskin identified which trees grow roots in the Naracoorte cave system in South Australia #asbs2025

In Ryan O'Donnell's research on species delimitation in Pterostylis, SNP filtering settings have a strong impact on how much sense the results make. Important to keep in mind for other groups of closely related species. #asbs2025

I'm going to presenting at #ASBS2025 this afternoon on a #Wikidata outreach project my colleagues and I undertook at the XX International Botanical Congress. If you want to get an early look at my slides you can see them here commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AS... #WikiProject