London’s Natural History Museum gets nearly $200 million to digitize many millions of specimens, while U.S. scientists look on with envy
Tucked away in drawers and cabinets in hundreds of institutions around the world may be answers to how our planet formed, how life evolved and interacts, and how resilient it may be in the future. But those collections—millions of ancient rocks and fossils, pressed plants, pinned insects, and other specimens—can only yield insights if researchers around the world can access them.
Helen Hardy, who runs NHM’s digitization efforts, says she “is super excited” by the promised funding, announced last week by. She and other U.K. researchers laid the groundwork in 2021 with an analysis estimating that digitizing the nation’s collections could save conservation programs, invasive species controls, crop and pharmaceutical development, and minerals extraction efforts £2 billion over the next 30 years. We made a “convincing case” for the funding, Hardy says.
Such efforts are already having an impact. In 2016, for example, Kansas and Egyptian researchers combined hundreds of geo-located digitized records of, a mosquito that spreads West Nile and other diseases, with environmental data.
The U.K. funding calls for NHM to help about 90 other U.K. institutions digitize their collections as well, which total about 137 million objects. Even though NHM has specimens from around the world, “it’s the local collections that have the depth of knowledge about the local flora and fauna” to help guide conservation and restoration efforts, says iDigBio’s Elizabeth Ellwood.
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