On Friday 29th April, we were pleased to welcome both Dr Vince Smith of the Natural History Museum, and Dr Mike Howe of BGS, to jointly present their webinar entitled ‘Digitising the world’s collections to address global challenges’. This talk continued our ‘Data digitisation, rescue, and re-purposing’ webinar series.
Natural science collections can tell us how the earth and its natural systems formed over 4.65 billion years, and the impact of human life on the natural world over the past few thousand years. If collections data can be unlocked and shared on a global scale, they become a dynamic research tool to help find solutions to the most important challenge humans face over the next 30 years – mapping a sustainable future for ourselves and the ecosystems on which we depend. Dr Vince Smith and Dr Mike Howe have been at the forefront of these activities, leading and contributing to the development of DiSSCo (https://www.dissco.eu), the Distributed System of Scientific Collections. This is a pan-European research infrastructure that is bringing together the data from an estimated 1 billion specimens held in 20 countries, including 130 million from 90 UK based institutions. This webinar will review contributions of natural science collections to environmental science and explore how these are being transformed through digitisation to unlock their scientific potential, including areas such as biodiversity conservation, control of invasive species, medicine discovery, agricultural research and development, and mineral exploitation.
Further information and details, this and the wider webinar series is online at https://digitalenvironment.org/cde-webinar-series/#VinceSmithMikeHowe.