New Data from Historic Collections

Across Australia there are 60 million natural history specimens held at museums, universities, botanic gardens, herbaria, seed banks and at CSIRO. These collections are made up of whole organisms, skins, tissue samples, skeletons and DNA samples – plus data … a lot of data … even including data about that data (metadata).

Collections metadata can describe from as little as what species the sample or organism is, to when and where they were collected; to site descriptions, species associations, and much more. There is immense hidden value in metadata, and researchers are continually discovering new things about our historic collections.

In this webinar three researchers will describe how they use the data ‘hidden’ in our national collections.