A huge thank you to everyone who went out on the hills collecting samples for Mountain heights, Hidden depths during 2023 and 2024. We received samples from 115 Munros in 2023, which together with samples collected during our 2021 Cairngorms National Park pilot project, brought our total up to an amazing 170 Munros sampled - well on the way to our target of 270. The 2024 sampling period started with 100 Munros left to sample, but the weather was less than kind! Consequently, a few Munros remained unvisited despite the heroic efforts of our volunteers, but another impressive tally of 85 Munros was sampled bringing our overall project total to a fabulous 255 Munros! 

Below, you can explore the interactive map to see which summits our fantastic volunteers sampled and see some pictures of them in action in the online gallery. In August 2023, project lead Andrea Britton visited the iconic Munro Schiehallion with Helen Needham from BBC Scotland to collect samples for the project and talk about the hidden biodiversity in our mountain soils. You can listen to a podcast about the trip here.

In total we received 765 samples from the 255 Munros. The project lab team was kept busy extracting DNA, analysing the soil chemistry and reviewing the photos of the sampling plots to identify the vegetation types that the samples were collected from. DNA from all of the samples was sent away for sequencing and we were able to get good sequencing data from 761 of them. Head over to the Results page to find out about the discoveries that were made.