Dozens of the world’s largest natural history museums recently revealed a survey of everything in their collections. The global inventory is made up of 1.1 billion objects ranging from dinosaur skulls to pollen grains and mosquitoes.
The survey’s organizers, who described the effort in Science magazine, said they hoped the survey would help museums join forces to answer pressing questions, such as how quickly species are becoming extinct and how climate change is altering the world. natural.
“It gives us intelligence now to start thinking about things that museums can do together that we wouldn’t have imagined before,” said Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington and one of the project’s leaders. “It is the argument for interconnecting the global museum.”
Scientists had previously created smaller inventory databases. But the new effort, which included 73 museums in 28 countries, was unmatched, experts said.
The survey revealed significant gaps in the world’s collections. Relatively few objects come from the regions around the Earth’s poles, which are particularly vulnerable to global warming. Insects, the most diverse group of animal species, were also underrepresented.
Emily Meineke, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the survey, said this effort among large institutions also laid the groundwork for surveys of smaller ones, which could contain even more surprises and give us a better understanding. of global biodiversity.
The world’s largest natural history museums have amassed vast collections. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History alone has 148 million, 33,146 objects. In recent years, some museums have put their objects online, but most objects in natural history museums have not yet been scanned and uploaded to the cloud, or even recorded in an online catalog.
Having only a rough idea of what was in their own collections, Johnson and his fellow museum directors admitted to having an even more tenuous understanding of what they collectively shared.
Instead of waiting years until everyone had digitized their collections, museum directors wanted to do a headcount now. They asked their curators to complete a survey describing what types of collections they housed in their museums—plants, fungi, fossils, etc. They calculated the size of each collection and where the scientists had gone to collect the objects they contained.
The curators also provided the number of objects that had been digitized, how many had DNA samples taken, and how many people had studied different groups of species in each museum. The museums created an online dashboard to explore the results.
“This is the realization of a dream that I and other people in my role have had for many years,” said Michael Novacek, senior vice president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Johnson said it was surprising how many scientists study mammals compared to other species. On the contrary, only 10 percent of scientists study insects. “This is kind of a deficit,” Johnson said. “Insects are the largest component of terrestrial biodiversity, and they are also great pollinators and vectors of diseases.”
Museums have collected relatively little in the Arctic or Antarctica. Novacek said it’s important for museums to have a record of the diversity of life there to understand how one and the other is changing with increasing temperatures. “It’s a call to action,” he said.
Knowing what is missing from the world’s museums could help them plan new expeditions aimed at filling the gaps.
“We might be able to make a collection plan for the 21st century,” Johnson said.
By: CARL ZIMMER
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6644983, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-05 00:20:08
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