New approaches and techniques to establish a sustainable, integrative and globally accessible virtual insect collection
Section Hymenoptera
Natural history collections are archives of global species diversity. They harbour an amazing diversity of unique treasures and are the true foundation of our understanding and exploration of biodiversity. Making natural history collections efficiently available, providing easy access to information, and rapidly disseminating relevant information do form a core priority of modern-day collection management policies. Never before has advanced technology been so readily available to achieve these goals.
Our main aim is use state-of-the-art technologies to explore and develop innovative strategies to build a bridge between the provider, i.e. the natural history collections, and potential users, including scientists, decision makers, and the general public. We will employ digital photography, in combination with existing, widely used and open source online resources, to make our extensive holdings of insects available, in particular unidentified material in accessions and reliably identified specimens of major insect orders. Our approach is governed by a strong focused on sustainable solutions.
Data exchange model showing the information exchange between primary source of data (natural history collection) and the user (public). All components of the system are already in place and established. Red arrows indicate one-directional, green
Part of this initiative is our drawer digitisation project