Blogs from the Natural History Museum
Inspiring a love of the natural world
The UK’s museums and botanical gardens hold exceptional and diverse natural sciences collections ranging from mites to meteorites. The estimated size of this national collection is over 150 million objects. Continue reading “Unlocking UK natural science collections | 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.
Continue reading “Playing Top Trumps for Water Quality Month | Digital Collections Programme”
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).
Continue reading “Data in action: museum collections provide evidence for protecting rainforests | Digital Collections Programme”
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.
Continue reading “Digitisation on demand: riverflies and redlists | Digital Collections”
There is an incredible amount of specimen data providing critical information on the natural world, but with less than 10% of the estimated 1.5 billion specimens digitally accessible, who is using this information? Continue reading “Who uses collection data? | Digital Collections Programme”
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.
Since 2015, the Natural History Museum London has made its research and collections data available through its Data Portal. Some important new features have just been added which make it easier for users to reuse this data. Continue reading “Our Evolving Data Portal | Digital Collections Programme”
Henry Buckley (1939-2002) is a relatively unknown pioneer in the world of Foraminifera. Buckley was discouraged from publicising his collection, up until recently this collection wasn’t well known in the micropalaeontological community but all that is changing.
The Buckley collection has been digitised and today is helping Museum PhD students to answer questions on evolution. Yale University also plan to use this collection to train new generations of scientists to identify modern planktonic foraminifera and to help develop automatic recognition software in the future.
We have finished imaging more than 5,700 Madagascan butterfly and moth (Lepidoptera) type specimens in the Museum’s collection. Continue reading “A swarm of Madagascan moths to join our online collection| Digital Collections Programme”
