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Enhancing biodiversity monitoring and people’s connection with nature: The Natural History Museum's Data Ecosystem
Fighting Climate Change- Effective Stewardship of the Environment
As a data scientist passionate about the climate, I was privileged to be part of a Thoughtworks team working alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a new data platform for the Natural History Museum’s Urban Nature Project. The Data Ecosystem will help researchers build a deeper understanding of the UK’s urban biodiversity, including its composition, how it relates to environmental conditions and how it responds to direct conservation action.
As part of the project, Thoughtworks was selected by the Natural History Museum to develop the new biodiversity and environmental monitoring Data Ecosystem that will capture, share and interpret urban nature data for different audiences. This platform will help transform the Museum’s scientific research and community science capabilities by bringing together a broad range of UK biodiversity and environmental data types in one place for the first time, encouraging more integrated cross-disciplinary research programmes.
The Museum will make the Data Ecosystem available to its researchers at the Museum’s, as well as researchers at the Museum’s partner institutes across the UK. Scientists will be able to study biodiversity data types alongside environmental data such as soil and atmospheric chemistry or noise pollution, rapidly and accurately. This, combined with access to the Museum’s 28 years of historical wildlife data from their South Kensington gardens, will build an increasingly detailed picture of biodiversity functioning and health and is expected to open up large-scale opportunities for research and nature positive action. The intention, over time, is to capture all new UK biodiversity and environmental data from Natural History Museum projects and create a central hub for the UK’s biodiversity data.
As Richard Hinton, CIO, Natural History Museum said: "The home to more than 80 million specimens - and with more than five million visitors annually - the Natural History Museum is also a center of research specialising in taxonomy, identification and conservation. The ‘Urban Nature Project’ gives us the opportunity, through data, to advance research, to support education and help people to reassess humanity's impact on UK biodiversity.”
https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/social-change/natural-history-museums-data-ecosystem?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social-organic&utm_campaign=nhm-blog_2024-02&gh_src=463a2f181us
Visual and environmental DNA-based observations of plants and wildlife, as well as environmental and acoustic monitoring data from a high spatial resolution sensor network in the Museum’s gardens will be curated and combined within the Data Ecosystem. The richness of data will enable the Museum’s scientists to build scientific evidence of the impacts that habitat creation, restoration, and translocation have on the UK’s urban wildlife, from grassland to pond habitats.
The Data Ecosystem is also designed to enable the Museum’s globally-recognised Community Science Programme, by providing a platform through which individuals, community groups and schools can join, contribute to and steer world-class research relating to their local wildlife and environment by inputting data.
Heather Cover-Kus
Heather is Head of Central Government Programme at techUK, working to represent the supplier community of tech products and services to Central Government.
Ellie Huckle
Ellie joined techUK in March 2018 as a Programme Assistant to the Public Sector team and now works as a Programme Manager for the Central Government Programme.
Annie Collings
Annie joined techUK as the Programme Manager for Cyber Security and Central Government in September 2023.
Ella Gago-Brookes
Ella joined techUK in November 2023 as a Markets Team Assistant, supporting the Justice and Emergency Services, Central Government and Financial Services Programmes.
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