A historical baseline for environmental change
The project focuses specifically on British plants and insects collected over the last two centuries, with a particular emphasis on East and Southeast England. This region has witnessed some of the most dramatic environmental shifts in the country over this time, such as the drainage of wetlands, agricultural intensification, and rapid urbanisation.
By digitising these records – including nearly 771,000 newly digitised specimens – the hub will provide a high-resolution historical baseline. This data is essential for understanding species turnover and shifts in flowering times (phenology) caused by climate change. These records will directly support flagship regional restoration efforts, such as the Wildlife Trust’s Great Fen project [https://www.greatfen.org.uk/], allowing conservationists to set recovery targets based on historical evidence.
Building a national network
The co-hub unites four of the UK’s largest university collections: the Cambridge University Herbarium [https://www.herbarium.plantsci...], the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge [https://www.museum.zoo.cam.ac....], Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford [https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/], and the Oxford University Herbaria [https://herbaria.plants.ox.ac....].
It also supports a node-network spanning from Gloucestershire to Suffolk, including:
- Preparatory nodes: Eight sites receiving help to develop collections for digitisation.
- Wider network: Nine further nodes benefiting from online training and support, forming a shared community of practice across the sector.
Dr Stuart Desjardins from the University of Leicester Herbarium said: “The three university herbaria included in the project (Oxford, Cambridge and Leicester) represent a remarkable continuity in British botanical science, bringing together the authors and reference material that underpin virtually every major flora of the British Isles over the past century: from George Claridge Druce’s List of British Plants at Oxford, through Tom Tutin’s Flora of the British Isles and Clive Stace’s New Flora of the British Isles
at Leicester, to Peter Sell and Gina Murrell’s Flora of Great Britain and Ireland at Cambridge.”
The resulting data will also be freely available through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility [https://www.gbif.org/ ] (GBIF), allowing researchers worldwide to access the collections.
About DiSSCo UK
This project is a key component of DiSSCo UK [https://dissco-uk.org/], a 10-year national programme funded through the UKRI Infrastructure Fund and delivered through the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in partnership with the Natural History Museum and over 100 partners across the UK.
UK natural science collections hold more than 140 million items spanning an incredible 4.6-billion-year history. Over the next decade, DiSSCo UK aims to make around half of these digitally accessible. This includes creating millions of new digital specimen records, mobilising existing data, and bringing unpublished collections information into wider use.
Through digitisation, coordination, innovation and community building, DiSSCo aims to create a unique infrastructure that builds UK digital capacity and maximises the impact of natural science data to help find solutions for global problems like food security and biodiversity loss.
AHRC Executive Chair Professor Christopher Smith said:
“For hundreds of years the UK has gathered and grown one of the world’s most comprehensive and diverse collections of scientific material in museums across the UK. It has been a long-held ambition to bring this collection together – and now this dream can come true.
“Over ten years, DiSSCo UK will deliver progress that would otherwise have taken over a century, including the creation of millions of newly digitised records and a network of around 100 collections from the Natural History Museum, Kew, Amgueddfa Cymru, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Scotland and the University of Cambridge to local collections that would never have had such access without it. And the outcomes of this £155 million investment will offer exciting new opportunities for science as well as society.
“AHRC is proud to have led UKRI’s largest ever investment in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums sector, yet another contribution to our leadership of the creative and cultural economy.”
Co-hub partners
In addition to the Cambridge and Oxford leads, the partnership includes: University of Leicester Herbarium; Norwich Castle Museum; Colchester Museum; Discover Bucks Museum; History of Science Museum (Oxford); Ipswich Museum; Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery; Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford); Royal Agricultural University (Cirencester); Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences (Cambridge); Abingdon County Hall Museum; British Antarctic Survey; British Entomological & Natural History Society; North Hertfordshire Museum; Northampton Museum & Art Gallery; Royal Holloway University of London; Saffron Walden Museum; Southend Museums; and Wisbech & Fenland Museum.
Image credit: Matt Lowe & Jack Ashby with some of the moth collection, Museum of Zoology. Credit: University of Cambridge