scholarly journals Herbarium collections policy of the Finnish Museum of Natural History

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Väre ◽  
Leena Myllys ◽  
Risto Väinölä ◽  
Pasi Sihvonen ◽  
Anniina Kuusijärvi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Tissue Samples ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
University Level ◽  
Herbarium Collections

The herbarium collections are sub-collections of the Finnish Museum of Natural History Luomus that manages national natural history collections, as referred to in the Universities Act. The general collections policy defines the overall principles and guidelines concerning the collections practices. The sub-collections policies specify its guidelines and instructions, considering the special nature of the sub-collections. The policy for the botanical and mycological herbarium collections guides the activities related to all botanical, mycological and phycological collections in herbaria, hence excluding digital collections, DNA and tissue samples as well as living collections, which have separate policies. The herbarium collections policy defines and outlines the purpose of the collections as is to accrue and preserve natural specimens representing biodiversity for research and university-level teaching. The policy defines the objectives and content of related activities, the division of responsibilities for the administration and care of the collections within the organisation, and the general principles and practices for the acquisition, preservation, availability and use of the collections.

scholarly journals Looking Back for the Future: Utilizing Sawfish Saws from Natural History Collections to Conserve the Critically Endangered Largetooth Sawfish (Pristis pristis)

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e25806
Author(s):  
Annmarie Fearing ◽  
Kelcee Smith ◽  
Tonya Wiley ◽  
Jeff Whitty ◽  
Kevin Feldheim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Diversity ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Mitochondrial Control Region ◽  
Genetic Bottleneck ◽  
Critically Endangered ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Term Survival ◽  
Tissue Samples ◽  
The Past ◽  
Natural History Collections

The Critically Endangered (International Union for Conservation of Nature) largetooth sawfish, Pristispristis, was historically distributed in the tropical Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Today, ‘viable’ populations are largely limited to northern Australia. Populations that have suffered from drastic declines in abundance, such as those experienced by P.pristis, are typically at risk of having reduced, or low, levels of genetic diversity. Previous research found that P.pristis in Australia have experienced a genetic bottleneck, but it is unclear whether this bottleneck is the result of contemporary declines over the last century, or if it is the result of historic processes. A direct way to assess whether this genetic bottleneck occurred relatively recently is to compare levels of genetic diversity in contemporary and historic populations. Sawfish saws that were taken as trophies over the past century can now be found in natural history collections around the world and can provide DNA from past sawfish populations. We collected tissue samples from 150 dried P.pristis saws found in both private and public natural history collections. Because DNA from natural history specimens tends to be highly degraded, we targeted ten small DNA fragments, ~150 base pairs each, to amplify and sequence the entire mitochondrial control region. These data will provide important baseline information about P.pristis that can be used to quantify any loss of genetic diversity over the past ~100 years and assess their long-term survival potential. If the levels of genetic diversity in contemporary populations are severely reduced from those of past populations, protecting remaining genetic diversity within and between viable populations should be a priority in conservation plans.

scholarly journals The colonial legacy of herbaria

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
DA S Park ◽  
Xiao Feng ◽  
Shinobu Akiyama ◽  
Marlina Ardiyani ◽  
Neida Avendano ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Global Change ◽  
Inverse Relationship ◽  
Plant Biodiversity ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global North ◽  
Herbarium Collections

Herbarium collections shape our understanding of the world's flora and are crucial for addressing global change and biodiversity conservation. The formation of such natural history collections, however, are not free from sociopolitical issues of immediate relevance. Despite increasing efforts addressing issues of representation and colonialism in natural history collections, herbaria have received comparatively less attention. While it has been noted that the majority of plant specimens are housed in the global North, the extent of this disparity has not been rigorously quantified to date. Here, by analyzing over 85 million specimen records and surveying herbaria across the globe, we assess the colonial legacy of botanical collections and how we may move towards a more inclusive future. We demonstrate that colonial exploitation has contributed to an inverse relationship between where plant biodiversity exists in nature and where it is housed in herbaria. Such disparities persist in herbaria across physical and digital realms despite overt colonialism having ended over half a century ago, suggesting ongoing digitization and decolonization efforts have yet to alleviate colonial-era discrepancies. We emphasize the need for acknowledging the inconvenient history of herbarium collections and the implementation of a more equitable, global paradigm for their collection, curation, and use.

scholarly journals Use of European Open Science Cloud and National e-Infrastructures for the Long-Term Storage of Digitised Assets from Natural History Collections

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham Nieva de la Hidalga ◽  
Nicolas Cazenave ◽  
Donat Agosti ◽  
Zhengzhe Wu ◽  
Mathias Dillen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Open Science ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Long Term Storage ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Herbarium Collections ◽  
Access Services ◽  
Term Storage ◽  
Biodiversity Information

Digitisation of Natural History Collections (NHC) has evolved from transcription of specimen catalogues in databases to web portals providing access to data, digital images, and 3D models of specimens. These portals increase global accessibility to specimens and help preserve the physical specimens by reducing their handling. The size of the NHC requires developing high-throughput digitisation workflows, as well as research into novel acquisition systems, image standardisation, curation, preservation, and publishing. Nowadays, herbarium sheet digitisation workflows (and fast digitisation stations) can digitise up to 6,000 specimens per day. Operating those digitisation stations in parallel, can increase the digitisation capacity. The high-resolution images obtained from these specimens, and their volume require substantial bandwidth, and disk space and tapes for storage of original digitised materials, as well as availability of computational processing resources for generating derivatives, information extraction, and publishing. While large institutions have dedicated digitisation teams that manage the whole workflow from acquisition to publishing, other institutions cannot dedicate resources to support all digitisation activities, in particular long-term storage. National and European e-infrastructures can provide an alternative solution by supporting different parts of the digitisation workflows. In the context of the Innovation and consolidation for large scale digitisation of natural heritage (ICEDIG Project 2018), three different e-infrastructures providing long-term storage have been analysed through three pilot studies: EUDAT-CINES, Zenodo, and National Infrastructures. The EUDAT-CINES pilot centred on transferring large digitised herbarium collections from the National Museum of Natural History France (MNHN) to the storage infrastructure provided by the Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur (CINES 2014), a European trusted digital repository. The upload, processing, and access services are supported by a combination of services provided by the European Collaborative Data Infrastructure (EUDAT CDI 2019) and CINES . The Zenodo pilot included the upload of herbarium collections from Meise Botanic Garden (APM) and other European herbaria into the Zenodo repository (Zenodo 2019). The upload, processing and access services are supported by Zenodo services, accessed by APM. The National Infrastructures pilot facilitated the upload of digital assets derived from specimens of herbarium and entomology collections held at the Finnish Museum of Natural History (LUOMUS) into the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility (FinBIF 2019). This pilot concentrates on simplifying the integration of digitisation facilities to Finnish national e-infrastructures, using services developed by LUOMUS to access FinBIF resources. The data models employed in the pilots allow defining data schemas according to the types of collection and specimen images stored. For EUDAT-CINES, data were composed of the specimen data and its business metadata (those the institution making the deposit, in this case MNHN, considers relevant for the data objects being stored), enhanced by archiving metadata, added during the archiving process (institution, licensing, identifiers, project, archiving date, etc). EUDAT uses ePIC identifiers (ePIC 2019) to identify each deposit. The Zenodo pilot was designed to allow defining specimen data and metadata supporting indexing and access to resources. Zenodo uses DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) and the underlying data types as the main identifiers for the resources, augmented with fields based on standard TDWG vocabularies. FinBIF compiles Finnish biodiversity information to one single service for open access sharing. In FinBIF, HTTP URI based identifiers are used for all data, which link the specimen data with other information, such as images. The pilot infrastructure design reports describe features, capacities, functions and costs for each model, in three specific contexts are relevant for the implementation of the Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo 2019) research infrastructure, informing the options for long-term storage and archiving digitised specimen data. The explored options allow preservation of assets and support easy access. In a wider context, the results provide a template for service evaluation in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC 2019) which can guide similar efforts.

scholarly journals Engaging K-12 Audiences with Biodiversity Data through Advancing Digitization for Biodiversity Collections

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e26473
Author(s):  
Molly Phillips ◽  
Anne Basham ◽  
Marc Cubeta ◽  
Kari Harris ◽  
Jonathan Hendricks ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Science Standards ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
K 12

Natural history collections around the world are currently being digitized with the resulting data and associated media now shared online in aggregators such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio). These collections and their resources are accessible and discoverable through online portals to not only researchers and collections professionals, but to educators, students, and other potential downstream users. Primary and secondary education (K-12) in the United States is going through its own revolution with many states adopting Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS https://www.nextgenscience.org/). The new standards emphasize science practices for analyzing and interpreting data and connect to cross-cutting concepts such as cause and effect and patterns. NGSS and natural history collections data portals seem to complement each other. Nevertheless, many educators and students are unaware of the digital resources available or are overwhelmed with working in aggregated databases created by scientists. To better address this challenge, participants within the National Science Foundation Advancing Digitization for Biodiversity Collections program (ADBC) have been working to increase awareness of, and scaffold learning for, digitized collections with K-12 educators and learners. They are accomplishing this through individual programs at institutions across the country as part of the Thematic Collections Networks and collaboratively through the iDigBio Education and Outreach Working Group. ADBC partners have focused on incorporating digital data and resources into K-12 classrooms through training workshops and webinars for both educators and collections professionals, as well as through creating educational resources, websites, and applications that use digital collections data. This presentation includes lessons learned from engaging K-12 audiences with digital data, summarizes available resources for both educators and collections professionals, shares how to become involved, and provides ways to facilitate transfer of educational resources to the K-12 community.

scholarly journals Completing the Data Pipeline: Collections Data Use in Research, Education and Outreach

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e26522
Author(s):  
Gil Nelson ◽  
Molly Phillips ◽  
Anna Monfils ◽  
Bruce MacFadden ◽  
Gabriela Hogue
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Data Use ◽  
Round Table ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Research Education ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Data Pipeline ◽  
Education And Outreach ◽  
Data Collections

Type of Submission: Symposium and Educational Share Fair Themes: Digitisation and Collections Data, Collections Access and Use, Education, and Science Communications Full Title: Completing the Data Pipeline: Collections Data Use in Research, Education and Outreach Short Title: Joint SCNet/BLUE/iDigBio Symposium at SPNHC 2018 Organizers: Gil Nelson, Molly Phillips, Bruce MacFadden, Gabriela Hogue, and Anna Monfils Sponsors: iDigBio, Small Collections Network (SCNet), and Biodiversity Literacy Litercy in Undergraduate Education (BLUE) Contact information: Molly Phillips [email protected] 352-672-2664 and Gil Nelson [email protected] 850-766-2649 Symposium Abstract Natural history collections around the world have been digitizing and making their data available online with the support of initiatives like GBIF, iDigBio, and ALA. Collections digitization and mobilization efforts are far from complete, but with hundreds of millions of specimen records now available online, natural history collections can safely claim the distinction of being a source of ‘big data”. The purpose of this symposium is to highlight the diverse uses of digital collections resources for research, education, and outreach including activities that are currently underway around the globe with special focus on using collections data for: innovative research applications, inspiring outreach initiatives intended for new audiences, and educational resources and programs that are ensuring a new generation of competent collections data users. We anticipate this to be a full day event with up to 20 speakers. We will invite selected speakers to submit abstracts and depend on abstract submissions through the SPNHC abstract submission process. Educational Share Fair In addition to the symposium, we propose a one hour roundtable “share fair” session for educational materials. This is an opportunity for participants to get feedback on education or outreach materials that are in development. This differs from the normal SPNHC DemoCamp in both format and focus. During the one hour time period, we will offer two rounds of ten presentations simultaneously. Each presenter will be set up at a round table and be given 25 minutes to present their materials and collect feedback and generate discussion with the participants that sit at their table. These are intended as informal sessions so no AV will be provided, but presenters can bring a laptop and copies of any of their materials to share. Depending on turnout, we could offer 20 unique presentations or repeat the 10 presentation in both sessions to allow participants to give feedback to multiple presenters. We will advertise the share fair broadly through various listservs to generate presenters and participants.

scholarly journals The Genomic Resources Collection Policy of the Finnish Museum of Natural History

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunilla Ståhls ◽  
Alexandre Aleixo ◽  
Marko-Tapio Hyvärinen ◽  
Anniina Kuusijärvi ◽  
Leena Myllys ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Animal Tissue ◽  
Collection Management ◽  
Collections Management ◽  
Tissue Samples ◽  
Genomic Resources ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Genome Level ◽  
Research And Education

The Genomic Resources Collection is a separate, independently managed part of the natural history collections of the Finnish Museum of Natural History Luomus specifically intended for consumptive research. The GRC policy deals with the materials that are archived for the very purpose of enabling the study of biological diversity at the genome level, DNA extractions of animal, fungal and plant specimens, and animal tissue samples stored deep-frozen for purposes of future DNA extraction. The GRC policy defines the purpose of the collections, the objectives and content of the procedures and activities related to them, the distribution of responsibilities for collection management and maintenance in Luomus, and the principles of collection accumulation, preservation and accessibility. The aim of the GRC is to store and loan genomic samples for research purposes. In taxonomic coverage the collection overlaps with all the taxonomically delimited specimen collections managed by the Zoology and Botany Units, but is distinguished as being directed to preserve the genomic (DNA) information irrespective of the phenotypic variation that are the focus of specimen collections. The GRC includes both Finnish and foreign samples, all legally and ethically obtained, mostly linked to a specimen voucher in the taxonomic collections. The GRC samples are documented and trackable in Luomus collections management system. In accordance with the Universities Act, the GRC belongs to the national natural science collections of Luomus. For their part, the GRC collection implement the mission of Luomus, which is to be “responsible for the preservation, accumulation and exhibition of the national natural history collections and for research and education relating to them”.

Joseph Sidebotham: vicissitudes of a Victorian collector

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence M. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Species Limits ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
As Species ◽  
Scientific World

Joseph Sidebotham (1824–1885) was a Manchester cotton baron whose natural history collections are now in the Manchester Museum. In addition to collecting he suggested a method for identifying and classifying Lepidoptera and investigated variation within species as well as species limits. With three close collaborators, he is credited with discovering many species new to Britain in both Lepidoptera and Coleoptera. A suspicion of fraud attaches to these claims. The evidence is not clear-cut in the Lepidoptera, but a possible reason is suggested why Sidebotham, as an amateur in the increasingly professional scientific world, might have engaged in deceit.

The Banksian natural history collections of the Endeavour voyage and their relevance to modern taxonomy

1981 ◽  
Vol 1981 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-70
Author(s):  
H. B. Carter ◽  
Judith A. Diment ◽  
C. J. Humphries ◽  
Alwyne Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Natural History Collections

Correspondence between Adolphe Brongniart and Robert Schomburgk: trading natural history collections for honours

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-336
Author(s):  
PIOTR DASZKIEWICZ ◽  
MICHEL JEGU
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Herbarium Specimens ◽  
British Guiana ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
German Naturalist

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses some correspondence between Robert Schomburgk (1804–1865) and Adolphe Brongniart (1801–1876). Four letters survive, containing information about the history of Schomburgk's collection of fishes and plants from British Guiana, and his herbarium specimens from Dominican Republic and southeast Asia. A study of these letters has enabled us to confirm that Schomburgk supplied the collection of fishes from Guiana now in the Laboratoire d'Ichtyologie, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The letters of the German naturalist are an interesting source of information concerning the practice of sale and exchange of natural history collections in the nineteenth century in return for honours.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document