The Canadian Museum of Nature has launched a free online database that contains 710,000 different records of plants, animals, fossils and mineral specimens from its national collections.
Researchers and the public are now just a click away from 22 per cent of the museum’s “cataloguable units” of biological and geological materials, officials say.
“Museums have been doing this increasingly since the technology has been in place. We weren’t there yet, so the impetus was to get our information in a form that we could share it with the world,” says Jeff Saarela, a museum research scientist and botanist.
Saarela led the project team that developed the database in collaboration with software developer eSolutionsGroup.
While the museum’s collections include millions of items gathered over the last 150 years, the inclusion of newer data is being prioritized because of its utility to the museum’s current research projects and relatively easy digitizing process, according to Saarela.
“We have a huge backlog of information – with the older specimens you have to enter the input by hand one by one, so it will take some time to fully digitize,” says Saarela.
The digitized catalogues contain extensive information about each specimen, including location of collection, date of collection, who collected it, and other pertinent facts.
The uses of this data include tracking invasive species patterns, understanding competition in ecosystems, mapping changes in habitat or species range over time, or assisting with the study of climate change, says Mark Graham, the museum’s vice-president of research and collections.
The creation of the database is the McLeod Street museum’s contribution to an ongoing international scientific trend.
“We were presented with the opportunity to have our data included in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s online collection, something we take pride in,” says Graham.
The museum’s data is now presented alongside that from almost 600 other scientific institutions, including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the Florence Museum of Natural History in Italy.
The museum’s database is enhanced by the addition of about 16,000 records with high-resolution images. The majority are plant specimens stored in the museum’s National Herbarium of Canada.
“For people interested in nature, if they want to see what a species looks like based on an expertly identified specimen, they could absolutely go to the database and look at the pictures there,” says Saarela.
Included in the database are roughly 9,000 specimens from the Ottawa area, many collected in Centretown.
One unique mammal and former resident of the Centretown area stands out it the new online collection. The Condylure Cristata, otherwise known as the Star-nosed mole, was voted one of the 10 ugliest animals by the Mother Nature Network. What makes this animal distinct is its hairless and ringed nose, with a unique star-shaped pattern of 22 pink, fleshy tentacles.