Almost every town and city in the UK has a museum. there are thousands more museums around the world. The victorians were avid collectors of curiosities from around the world and the museums they created were the showcase for many collections. The museum in my hometown has a huge collection of birds eggs. Something that would be frowned upon today. Yet in many cases the collections and information they contain can still provide valuable research.
People have for centuries been collecting specimens from the natural world. Minerals, plants, fungi and animals. Today, there are an estimated two billion specimens housed in natural history museums around the world! These biological collections document where species and populations exist now. They also give insight into where they existed decades and centuries before. The collections hold irreplaceable information necessary for uncovering the patterns of changes in species distributions and ecosystem composition over time. Scientists can now use such data and information in order to address key environmental issues we are facing right now, such as the impact of climate change and how diseases affect wildlife and humans.
The collections and the individual items need to be catalogued for research use. A new project called Notes from Nature is trying to create that catalog. You can help them to transcribe the data and make it available for further use in biodiversity and conservation research.
To visit the new Notes from Nature web site Click Here
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