My Lightning Talk at Over the Air 2016 - about the digital collections programme at the Natural History Museum London, the Natural History Open Data Challenge on the hackathon, and some calls-to-action!
Tonight I would like to Invite you to use your skillz and passion for open everything for the good of the natural world, help us set all of the knowledge about the natural world free. Open Data – Open Source skills for science and the future of our planet.
Over 80 million specimens
documenting 4.5 billion years of life, the Earth and the solar system.
Dinosaurs
Memories from childhood
Not everyone can come
All of this information needs to be set free
for example - only near-complete skeleton of the Dodo is in Durban
Remained unstudied until the 21st century
3D laser surface scanning
The most complete anatomical atlas of the bird, unstudied for more than a century
Active research museum,
scientists come from all around the world to study our collections, but it’s not an easy thing to have both a research budget and a travel budget that gives you the time you need
And these collections can answer key questions about the geology of our planet and life on Earth.
Over the next five years we plan to digitise a quarter of the Museum's
flexible informatics and visualisation tools to analyse the data.
How do we make the plants we eat resilient to environmental change?
- How do we combat neglected tropical diseases?
- How is climate change affecting pollinators and their food plants
- And how do we minimise our impact on our planet as we continue to extract natural resources?
Not just past- also our future
food security,
invasive species,
emerging diseases
Our pollinators
CKAN from the OKFN
Open Source on GitHub
MapQuest & Open Street Map
Built on APIs
Bioaccoustica contains recordings, such as these mole crickets
We’ve taken the casts of their burrows to create 3D models – recreate the sounds they make in the echo chamber
3D scans available in the Data Portal
- micro-CT facility to scan the insects' brains in 3D,
minute structures that would be damaged if the brains were removed.
behaviour and memory
Climate change impact on pollinators of our food
We’ve hacked together some pretty ingenious rigs to get 360 imagery and labels from all angles
Labour intensive process
Old school – happening behind closed doors
Leverage your cognitive surplus – what if all that time spent watching Gangnam Style – built the Wikipedia for Natural History?
engage people in the science that happens here,
Internet allows us to reach everyone
What if you spent some of your Facebook time helping out science?
We are Crowdsourcing specimen transcription
Notes from Nature on Zooniverse, open source on GitHub,
Parasitoid wasps
Natural enemy of the pests who invade our crops
Parasitoid wasps
Natural enemy of the pests who invade our crops
- all this goes to the Data Portal
- Next step is to open to contributions from around the world – YOU are the scientist & observer
Our Citizen Science projects invite you to collect data, such as about Seaweed
-rising sea temperature rise
-the arrival and spread of non-native species of seaweed
-ocean acidification (the sea becoming more acidic as a result of absorbing carbon dioxide from the air)
Our Bioblitzes invite you to explore your immediate environment, documenting and identifying what you see, and uploading it to open platforms such as iSpot
The modern-day Natural History collector is armed with a mobile phone –taking photos of the plants and animals they observe, and uploading that data along with GPS coordinates and data fields you can fill it out on the spot, shared with the world.
The future of Natural History belongs to the Platform Coders, App Makers and Hardware Hackers, documenting the world around us to tackle issues that effect everyone of us directly