Repurposing Digitised Natural History Collections

The world’s natural history collections, with perhaps 3 billion specimens spanning space and time, provide unparalleled information on species distributions and traits. These specimen records, coupled with other resources, are being used to address longstanding questions in ecology and evolutionary biology and a host of biodiversity-related societal challenges. Through a series of case studies, Dr. Soltis will illustrate some of the many uses to which museum specimens and their digital data are currently being applied. These case studies link and analyze specimen data and related data sources and show how high-throughput analysis and artificial intelligence can be applied to centuries-old museum specimens to solve 21st-century problems.