Collaborations

The Museum is a founder member of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities which aims to promote research in systematic biology and access to collections, information and expertise; we were a partner in the Global Environment Facility funded project to develop the natural history collections in Bogor, Indonesia; we are active participants in international actions to promote the Global Taxonomic Initiative; and through our membership of the UK’s delegation we contribute to policy formulation and discussion within the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice of the Convention on Biological Diversity.  On a national level our botanists are working with social scientists, public bodies and amateur groups in an extensive programme of initiatives to monitor and defend UK biodiversity.

Our scientists and curatorial staff work with a broad range of government, academic and commercial partners. For example, in the UK our palaeontologists are collaborating with a consortium of institutions to uncover insights into the early history of humans in Britain, in a £1.2 million pound major five-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

In Europe, we are participants in many EU-funded projects. We coordinate and manage SYNTHESYS, an EU-funded network of 20 leading European natural history institutions. It aims to create a single ‘virtual’ museum service comprising the institutions’ physical collections and analytical facilities together with integrated databases of collections-based information. SYNTHESYS will help to stimulate work in key areas of research such as biodiversity and the environment.   Plus over 26,000 user days of access will be provided.

Through the Centre for Russian and Central Asian Mineral Studies (CERCAMS), which was set up by the Museum in 2002, our mineralogists are collaborating with scientists from Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and China to coordinate research on mineral deposits.

Another major European project is the Biological Collections Access Service for Europe (BioCASE), which is making collections-based information more widely available online. Through BioCASE, which is funded by the European Commission, we are contributing information to a wider drive to share biodiversity data globally – the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Already the GBIF data portal (www.gbif.net) has nearly 24 million specimen data records.