Guest blog by Liz Duffel, Georeferencing Digitiser
Most specimens within the Museum collection have locality information, showing where the specimen was found, on the accompanying label(s). When we are digitising our specimens, we can use that locality information for georeferencing – the process used to give the locality of a specimen geographical coordinates, so that it can be plotted on a map.
A data portal visualisation showing the global distribution of the Museum’s zoological specimens with digital records
This is important because it allows for mapping and modelling, which underpins research on anything from species distributions and relationships, to environmental changes or targeting conservation practices.
Natural history collections provide an enormous evidence base for scientific research on the natural world. We are working to digitise our collection and provide global, open access to this data via our Data Portal.
Tray of mayflies (Ephemeroptera) with bounding boxes from the Inselect programme
To digitise the collection we are developing digital capture flows that cater for a wide range of collection types. One of the applications we have developed is Inselect – a cross-platform, open source desktop PC application that automates the cropping of individual images of specimens from whole-drawer scans.
We are in the process of digitising the Museum’s parasitic louse (Phthiraptera) collection, which consists of around 73,000 microscope slides. The collection is one of the largest – and the most taxonomically comprehensive – in the world.
Human lice specimens (Pediculus humanus capitis)
Lice are permanent ectoparasites, meaning they live on the outside of their bird and mammal hosts. They are highly host specific, with the majority of the ~5,000 louse species being unique to a particular host species of mammals and birds.
Our previous blog post looked at preparing the Lepidoptera for digitisation. In this post, we will look at the second part of the digitisation process; the imaging and transcription that allows data to be set free and accessed by the global science audience on the Museum’s Data Portal.
The imaging equipment set up to digitise the Lepidoptera collection
We are working to digitise more than half a million British and Irish butterflies and moths. Our three year iCollections project started in 2013, and we have received additional funding from the Cockayne Trust to continue this digitisation work to September 2017.
Original drawer with Mullein (Cuculblia verbasci) specimens.
This October, several colleagues from the insects division of the Museum attended the 25th International Congress of Entomology (ICE2016), an event that is held every four years. This year’s took place in Orlando, Florida with the theme “entomology without borders.” The Museum’s Vince Smith writes about his experiences at the world’s biggest entomological conference.
Part of the cavernous Orange County Convention Center which hosted ICE2016
With 6,682 delegates from 102 countries, giving a staggering 5,396 presentations, the plenary sessions were more like attending a football match (in scale if not in tone) than a scientific meeting! This is the largest conference I’ve ever attended – my heartfelt congratulations to the organisers for ensuring ICE2016 ran smoothly.
On Friday 30 September the Miniature Lives Magnified team joined our colleagues in the halls of the Museum in South Kensington for our annual festival, Science Uncovered.
The theme for this year’s event for European Researchers’ Night was Hidden Worlds – a perfect opportunity to invite folks to give our online The Killer Within Expedition a go, and to show off our chalcid wasps!
Miniature Lives Magnified at the Museum’s Science Uncovered event
It was wonderful to meet with such a wide range of visitors, from children coming straight from school with their families, to young adults enjoying a date night with a beer in hand, and of course the full range of ages as Museum-goers enjoyed the chance to chat with all our scientists and learn more about their work.
The butterflies and moths amassed by avid collectors Dr EA Cockayne, Dr HBD Kettlewell and Lord Walter Rothschild make up the core of the Museum’s world famous collection of British and Irish Lepidoptera.
Small copper butterflies that have been digitised and rehoused as part of the project
The Museum is digitising the Lepidoptera collection and using the data to ask important scientific questions about the effects of environmental change. Dr Cockayne passion led him to form the Cockayne Trust for Lepidoptera research, his legacy is funding the digitisation.
The Orchid Observers project is closing at the end of July (so if you can help us out with the last few classifications then you have just a few days left!). We’d like to say a huge thank you to all of the volunteers who photographed orchids, identified photos online or transcribed and classified our museum specimens. Your time, expertise and enthusiasm is really valued, so thanks for being part of the Orchid Observers team.
A big thank you to everyone who has volunteered to help us with the Orchid Observers citizen science project!
The project had two main research questions:
Firstly, the climate science research: Are orchid flowering times being affected by climate change?
Secondly, the social science research: How do volunteers interact and share ideas and knowledge with one another, within a project that combines both outdoor and online activities?
The second question was of particular interest to our funders, the Arts and Humanities Research Council. We are asking all Orchid Observers volunteers to answer a short survey to help us address the second question, so keep an eye out for that coming soon. Here I’ll update you on the science research outcomes and how we are analysing the data you’ve collected.
Deborah Paul presenting on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Ben Price and Douglas Russell blogged recently about presentations by Museum colleagues at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Protection of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) in Berlin, noting that delegates were passionate about the potential of digitisation to help us illustrate, research and understand our changing world. As well as presenting, we learned a lot from the other presenters and attendees, picking up some themes which are particularly relevant to our Digital Collections Programme (DCP).
