The Global Museum: natural history collections and the future of evolutionary biology and public education
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Abstract
Natural history museums are unique spaces for interdisciplinary research and for educational innovation. Through extensive exhibits and public programming and by hosting rich communities of amateurs, students, and researchers at all stages of their careers, they provide a place-based window to focus on integration of science and discovery, as well as a locus for community engagement. At the same time, like a synthesis radio telescope, when joined together through emerging digital resources, the global community of museums (the ‘Global Museum’) is more than the sum of its parts, allowing insights and answers to diverse biological, environmental, and societal questions at the global scale, across eons of time, and spanning vast diversity across the Tree of Life. We argue that, whereas natural history collections and museums began with a focus on describing the diversity and peculiarities of species on Earth, they are now increasingly leveraged in new ways that significantly expand their impact and relevance. These new directions include the possibility to ask new, often interdisciplinary questions in basic and applied science; inform biomimetic design; and even provide solutions to climate change, global health and food security challenges. As institutions, they are incubators for cutting-edge research in biology and simultaneously protect core infrastructure for present and future societal needs. In this perspective, we discuss challenges to the realization of the full potential of natural history collections and museums to serve society. After reviewing collections and types of museums, including local and global efforts, we discuss the value of specimens and the importance of observations. We then focus on mapping and modelling of museum data (including place-based approaches and discovery), and explore the main projects, platforms and databases enabling this. We also explore ways in which improved infrastructure will allow higher quality science and increased opportunities for interdisciplinary research and communication, as well as new uses of collections. Finally, we aim to improve relevant protocols for the long-term storage of specimens and tissues, ensuring proper connection with tomorrow’s technologies and hence further increasing the relevance of natural history museums.
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2019. The Global Museum: natural history collections and the future of evolutionary biology and public education. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27666v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27666v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
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Competing Interests
Scott Edwards is an Academic Editor for PeerJ.
Author Contributions
Freek T. Bakker prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Alexandre Antonelli authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Julia Clarke authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Joseph A Cook prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Scott V Edwards authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Per GP Ericson authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Søren Faurby authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Nuno Ferrand authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Magnus Gelang authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Rosemary G Gillespie authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Martin Irestedt authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Kennet Lundin authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Ellen Larsson authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Pável Matos-Maraví authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Johannes Müller authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Ted von Proschwitz authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
George K Roderick authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Alexander Schliep authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Niklas Wahlberg authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
John Wiedenhoeft prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Mari Källersjö authored or reviewed drafts of the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
No raw data or code was used for this paper.
Funding
This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council (B0569601), the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013, ERC Grant Agreement 331024), the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, a Wallenberg Academy Fellowship, the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, the Wenner-Gren Foundations, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University to A.A.; the Marie Sklodowska-Curie research fellowship (European Commission, project MARIPOSAS-704035) to P.M.-M. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.