Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria Annual Report 2018-19

Volunteers at Melbourne Gardens
VOLUNTEERS AND ASSOCIATES
Volunteers and Honorary Associates
worked across Royal Botanic Gardens
Victoria in a variety of roles at Cranbourne
Gardens, Melbourne Gardens, in the
Herbarium and with the Engagement and
Impact Division. Working in partnership
with staff, they welcomed visitors,
guided tourists, supported science,
planted and propagated, and provided
important knowledge and skills. In 2018-19,
volunteers and associates contributed
almost 14,000 hours to Royal Botanic
Gardens Victoria, adding significant value
to the organisation.
Science Division Volunteers
During 2018–19 year, volunteers
contributed more than 8,500 hours of
work to the Science Division, worked with
staff on curation and documentation of
the State Botanical Collection, assisted in
the Royal Botanic Gardens Library, and
with conservation research projects.
‘Fungimap’ had eight volunteers attending
the gardens to work in the reporting
period of the project, collectively
contributing more than 630 hours to
enter fungi record data and respond to
fungal identification requests, manage
the ‘Fungimap’ bookshop, assist with
archiving projects and attend to other
administrative and operational tasks.
Other volunteers have contributed to
work in the field as part of the ‘Putting
Victoria’s Fungal Diversity on the Map’
project, which has expanded the work
from previous years to now include 15
rare and threatened fungi species. Other
volunteers assist remotely with updates
to the ‘Fungimap’ website, e-Newsletters
and social media platforms.
Volunteers with the orchid conservation
program assisted in over 1,240 hours of
laboratory micropropagation and nursery
repotting/maintenance across both
Cranbourne and Melbourne. A total of 10
volunteers assisted in 600 hours of field
work involving orchid site maintenance,
fencing/caging threatened populations,
reintroduction programs and pollinator
surveys.
The library’s 10 volunteers contributed
1,750 hours of work towards two of the
library’s goals to preserve and increase
access to the collection. Work included
cataloguing both new and old material
(including artworks), barcoding journals,
digitising artworks and paper records,
databasing and re-housing the nursery
catalogue collection, transcribing
Mueller’s 19th century ledger, and creating
descriptive lists of manuscript collections,
including the remains of Guilfoyle’s
Museum of Economic Botany. Volunteers
also continued to select images from the
library’s image database for publication in
the eFloras (VicFlora, HortFlora).
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