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.
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 […]
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 […]
The Florida Museum of Natural History in collaboration with iDigBio and the Natural Science Collections Alliance are hosting the fifth annual Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference virtually on June 7-9, 2021. The conference, Digital Data’s Grand Challenge: Expanding Discovery Across Multiple Domains, will provide an important opportunity to explore digital data tools, techniques, research […]
President-elect Joe Biden has announced that he will nominate Dr. Eric Lander, a geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician to serve as the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and his science adviser. According to the announcement, Biden will be elevating the role of science within the White House, including […]
Details about who will serve on and lead key congressional committees with jurisdiction over scientific research and education are emerging. The House Appropriations Committee, which is responsible for allocating federal funding, including to federal science agencies and programs, will have new leadership and several new faces. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) will succeed Chairwoman Nita […]
According to a new NSF-funded study published in the journal mBio, a lack of clarity on the exact origins of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a glaring weakness in the current approach to pandemic monitoring and response. The paper, entitled Preserve a Voucher Specimen! The Critical Need for Integrating Natural History Collections in Infectious Disease […]
On January 14, 2021, the Natural Science Collections Alliance (NSCA), in partnership with the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) and the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), organized a joint discussion between the Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN) and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) on the future of […]
After months of unfruitful negotiations, congressional leaders reached a deal on a $900 billion coronavirus stimulus package a few days before the holidays. The economic relief measure was passed by Congress on December 21, 2020 along with the fiscal year (FY) 2021 omnibus spending package. After demanding changes to relief provisions in the congressionally approved […]
A new advisory report, entitled, Economic Analyses of Federal Scientific Collections, explores the economic benefits of Federal scientific collections. The report provides a framework for economic analyses, including methods for documenting long-term operating costs and benefits of collections. The study was commissioned by the Interagency Working Group on Scientific Collections (IWGSC) part of the White […]