Natural Science Collections Alliance
Our members are part of an international community of museums, botanical gardens, herbariums, universities and other institutions that house natural science collections and utilize them in research, exhibitions, academic and informal science education, and outreach activities.
On March 11, 2021, Congress enacted the latest COVID-19 relief package—the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (H.R. 1319). The package includes $600 million for the National Science Foundation and $150 million for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, but it does not include research relief provisions at the levels requested by the scientific […]
Committees in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate with jurisdiction over science have announced the leadership for their subcommittees. Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Roger Wicker (R-MS), Chair and Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, announced the new structure and leadership of its subcommittees last month. Freshman Senator John […]
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora or CITES is an international treaty aimed at ensuring that international trade in listed animal and plant species does not threaten their survival. Currently there are 183 Parties to CITES, 182 countries, including the United States, and one regional economic integration organization, […]
On March 1, 2021, NSC Alliance joined forces with the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) and Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) in highlighting to lawmakers the value of mobilizing biodiversity specimens and data in spurring new scientific discoveries. In the letter to House Science Committee Leadership, the groups bring attention […]
Lawmakers are now working to pass a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 pandemic relief package the blueprint for which was adopted by both chambers of Congress on February 5, 2021 in the form of a budget resolution. A budget resolution does not require the President’s signature and serves as a guide to the House and Senate on […]
A new report, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, offers a comprehensive economic framework for biodiversity. It contends that the ongoing biodiversity loss is undermining the productivity, resilience, and adaptability of nature and poses significant risks to the global economy and human well-being. The independent review was commissioned by the UK government and led […]
A new paper published in Nature shows how collections have been used to understand the impacts of recent wildfires on Australian vegetation. The publication, Implications of the 2019-2020 megafires for the biogeography and conservation of Australian vegetation (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21266-5), reports on the biogeographic and taxonomic impact of Australia’s 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires. The authors quantified the […]
NSC Alliance has endorsed an action plan developed by the Science and Technology Action Committee that calls for doubling the federal expenditure for research and development and STEM education relative to gross domestic product (GDP), from 0.7 percent to 1.4 percent, over the next five years. The requested level of funding is estimated to reach […]
NSC Alliance has endorsed a petition expressing support for scientific research stations and their educational programming that have been adversely impacted by financial concerns as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The petition reads, in part: Unfortunately, current circumstances, especially COVID-related travel restrictions, have truncated cash flow to field stations thereby debilitating their capacity to […]
Over the past year there have been several exciting conversations about the possibilities of digital representations of the billions of specimens currently held in the world’s natural history collections. Two concepts the Digital Specimen proposed by the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) in Europe and the Extended Specimen emerging from the Biological Collections Network […]