City Nature Challenge 2022: Results and Highlights | Community Science

A round of applause for everyone that took part in City Nature Challenge this year! Between 29 April and 2 May, over 300 community scientists across London recorded a grand total of 4,436 observations of 1,087 species! You can view everybody’s findings in the iNaturalist project.  

Thanks are also due to the 338 naturalists in London and around the world that helped to identify the observations made during City Nature Challenge, validating over half of the observations in London to research grade records. With their quality assurance, these records can be used for the study of global urban biodiversity and conservation efforts. 

Continue reading “City Nature Challenge 2022: Results and Highlights | Community Science”

Over half a decade of digitisation  | Digital Collections Programme

Award winning digitisation

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The Natural History Museum Digital Collections Programme has just received a lovely Christmas present! Following our November win as best Not for Profit project of the year in the UK IT Industry Awards, we’ve just been notified that we are also winners in the Culture and Tourism Category of the World Summit Awards. Continue reading “Over half a decade of digitisation  | Digital Collections Programme”

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.

Continue reading “A kaleidoscope of beautiful birdwings”

Portraits inspired by data |Digital Collections Programme

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An algorithm produced portraits of Museum visitors made up of digital specimens instead of pixels – zoom in to see the specimens in each image.

On Friday 28 September we took part in European Researchers Night and tried something new with museum visitors. We have been experimenting with recreating photographs that contain digital specimens in place of the usual pixels. Continue reading “Portraits inspired by data |Digital Collections Programme”

A swarm of Madagascan moths to join our online collection| Digital Collections Programme

The Madagascan digitisation team, alongside the 5,700+ specimens digitised during this project.
The Madagascan digitisation team, From left to right: Phaedra Kokkini, David Lees, Alessandro Giusti, Alberto Zilli Geoff Martin, Peter Wing and Louise Allan.

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”