Playing Top Trumps for Water Quality Month | Digital Collections Programme

We are currently digitising 75,000 freshwater insects belonging to three small orders. The presence of these groups can give us an idea about the water quality of the river they live in. As August is #WaterQualityMonth we thought this would be a great time shed some light on these orders of insects that you might not have heard much about before.

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Data in action: museum collections provide evidence for protecting rainforests | Digital Collections Programme

Left: The woolly monkey (Lagothrix lagothicha) photographed by Evgenia Kononova via Wikipedia Right: The Scientific paper that inspired this blog.

In this blog, we’re looking at a recent paper that cited some of our data in investigating the conservation potential of protected areas of rainforest using data on the Woolly monkey (Lagothrix lagothricha).

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Digitisation on demand: riverflies and redlists | Digital Collections

A guest blog by Robyn Crowther

Ephemeroptera (mayflies), Plecoptera (stoneflies) and Trichoptera (caddisflies) – or EPT for short – are three orders of insects found in freshwater systems across the world. These three key groups are important bioindicators, meaning that their presence and the size of their populations can give us an idea about the health of a freshwater habitat. There are approximately 89,000 specimens in the Museum’s EPT collection, and the Digital Collections Programme (DCP) are in the process of digitising them. Mobilising this data will aid research being undertaken by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), to further our understanding of EPT distribution and assess these species’ vulnerability to extinction.

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A kaleidoscope of beautiful birdwings

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We have completed digitising the Museum’s birdwing butterfly collection. Images of more than 8000 specimens have been released onto the Museum’s data portal for anyone in the world to access. This digitisation project has enabled us to gather accurate information about what we have within our collection and this new online resource will support conservation plans to protect endangered species for the future.

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