Photo: Thomas Rosenthal, Museum fur Naturkunde
24 March 2023
Science magazine publishes today a big-scale survey that maps the collections of 73 of the world’s largest museums and herbaria, making the case for a global network of natural history collections. Does this ring a bell?
Natural History Collections are pivotal infrastructures for answering what is arguably the most important challenge humans face today – how to build a sustainable future for ourselves and the natural systems upon which we depend. Collection-holding institutions have, however, traditionally acted as independent organizations, lacking the necessary scale to fully answer some of the most important pending scientific questions about ecological, evolutionary, and geological processes.
It is thanks to initiatives like DiSSCo that a new landscape of interconnected collections sharing data, resources and protocols is within our reach. In fact, DiSSCo alone represents the largest ever formal agreement between natural history museums, botanic gardens and collection-holding universities in the world, bringing together more than 170 natural history collections across 23 European countries.
Photo: Chip Clark, Smithsonian Institution
Now, a big-scale survey led by some of the most important natural history collections in the US and the Natural History Museum in London brings attention to an endeavour that certainly aligns with DiSSCo’s. A Global Approach for Natural History Museum Collections, published today in Science magazine, is the result of a collaborative survey to map the collections from 73 of the world’s largest museums and herbaria in 28 countries. In the words of the project organisers, the survey is a first step of an ambitious effort to inventory global holdings a lay the foundations for a global museum network that can help scientists and decisionmakers find solutions to urgent, wide-ranging issues such as climate change, food insecurity, human health, pandemic preparedness, and wildlife conservation.
The report acknowledges the necessary effort in technical and methodological convergence that such a global network demands “to accelerate data practices, data sharing, and data stewardship in common knowledge platforms”. This effort is well known to DiSSCo partners all over Europe, and is finely illustrated by the scientific discussion currently under way on both sides of the Atlantic around the concept of Digital Extended Specimen, mentioned in the article and true cornerstone of DiSSCo.
Several colleagues from DiSSCo partners have contributed to the Science article, which is available here (paywalled content).