MVZ Dino

Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton cast, 2008 Adam Leache

impacts

The geospatial data, as provided by participating institutions and BioGeomancer, have added entirely new dimensions of use to museum collections.

1 biocollections 2 impacts 3 future

VertNet impacts

The data on locations of species can be integrated with climate, vegetation, elevation, temperature and other environmental variables from data that are already freely accessible. This allows researchers to correlate these variables with the primary occurrence data to learn about the habitat requirements of species, study how the distribution of species has changed historically, understand the evolution of species, and even successfully predict where undiscovered populations of organisms might exist.

 

These models inform conservation and restoration efforts, locate areas of potential conflicts of interest, address global conservation issues and predict the effects of climate change. Museum data served through open access networks repatriate critical ecological information back to the countries of origin and are, at times, the only existing information about a species.

The impacts and implications of projects of this magnitude are still being realized.

 

ORNIS will be able to connect both contemporary observations (e.g., from the avian knowledge network with historical museum records, enabling high resolution analyses of changes in avian diversity in time and space. Other aggregated biodiversity information services (e.g, NatureServe, GBIF, AmphibiaWeb and Encyclopedia of Life) benefit from the improved access to specimen data provided by our networks and allows new ways to communicate the importance of biodiversity and natural heritage to the public.