Overview
- Cambridge announced Wednesday it has been awarded £772,000 to co-lead the Central England DiSSCo UK Hub with Oxford, a two-year effort that will contribute 1,195,419 specimen records to the national dataset.
- National Museums Scotland and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh received more than £1.8 million to run a Scotland node that will create digital records for about 700,000 specimens including 250,000 insects and 388,000 herbarium sheets.
- Both projects will use high-throughput imaging and artificial intelligence to capture specimen photos, transcribe labels and diaries, and produce machine-readable records that will be published through UK datasets and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.
- The Central England hub will support 23 museums and herbaria and a node network from Gloucestershire to Suffolk while the Scotland node brings collections from Glasgow, Shetland, Aberdeen and national museums into the shared system.
- These two funded, two-year launches sit inside DiSSCo UK’s wider 10-year, £155 million programme to mobilise millions of collection records and make roughly half of the UK’s 140 million natural science items digitally accessible for research, conservation and public use.