How natural history museums can help restore the natural world

The perception of natural history collections is often one of a static time-capsule, recording the animals and plants that once were. But the reality is that they are an extraordinary resource that can be used to restore the natural world and help it flourish into the future.

This is the argument that museum researchers Professor Ken Norris and Dr John Tweddle are making in a new paper. The pair want to show the extraordinary value of integrating natural history collections into active conservation science that helps to protect and restore nature.

While natural history museums contain a wealth of information that could benefit the latter, there is more to be done when it comes to highlighting what they can provide, and how to access the vast resources they contain.

“I’ve spent a lot of time talking to conservation practitioners and government conservation agencies in the UK, exploring how they think that the museum’s collections and facilities can best support delivery of their nature recovery goals,” explains John. “It’s often the case that our role is primarily seen as an educational one.”

But this couldn’t be further from the truth. These collections contain an astonishing amount of information that could aid the restoration and recovery of the natural world, as well as helping to inform future initiatives.

The paper has been published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

How can natural history collections help conservation?

The researchers set out three different stages in which natural history collections can be used to inform conservation and nature recovery.

The first of these is perhaps the most obvious. They are effectively libraries of life, with each individual specimen recording not only what it is but where it was found and when.

With some of these specimens dating back to before the large-scale destruction of the natural world they can be used, for example, to recreate the past ranges of species. This data can then be used to help inform species recovery and reintroduction programmes, such as that which showed that Dalmatian pelicans lived in the UK until medieval times.

One step up from this is the ability to use these collections to recreate how these animals and plants once interacted. There is now a greater appreciation that each specimen contains a wealth of extra information that new, more advanced technologies are only just being able to analyse.

“Insects carry around residues of the plants they visited,” explains Ken. “So often if you collect a bee, it will have pollen still attached to it which tells you something about the plants it visited while it was alive. You can then use modern DNA based technologies to identify the plants from the pollen.”

Extraordinarily, scientists can do the reverse too.

“You can do similar things with herbarium specimens,” continues Ken. “You can go to herbarium specimen and look at the leaves and the flowers of a plant, and you can take swabs of those and look for the DNA of insects and other organisms which have fed on the leaves and which have visited the flowers.”

This means that by using museum specimens, researchers can start to build a more detailed picture of how an ecosystem might have functioned hundreds of years ago. This can then be used by conservationists as a guide to what they might want to achieve in the future.

Finally, there has been a growing interest and movement towards what is termed ‘whole-system’ interventions. This is what is often called ‘rewilding’, whereby conservationists aim to restore entire landscape-sized ecosystems and their myriad of intricate relationships.

Because of its scale, studying and analysing these massive interventions can be difficult. But one technique has risen to this challenge.

Known as environmental DNA, or eDNA, this is a method that allows scientists to sample water or soil, for example, and then test it for the DNA of any animals or plants that are present in or have moved through that area. This allows the researchers to study an entire landscape non-invasively by just taking a few small environmental samples.

“The application of such increasingly data-rich methods is now a key direction for conservation monitoring,” says John. “Supplemental to traditional visual surveys of well-studied taxonomic groups such as birds and flowering plants, are a suite of more holistic approaches, particularly eDNA-based methods that can yield a huge amount of conservation-relevant evidence from across the tree of life.”

“But of course, you need to know what types of organisms the DNA is from, and so your identifications are only as good as the reference library you’re comparing the DNA against. And that’s a big role that museums can play, as we have well-identified voucher specimens from which to help build that reference library.”

By helping to populate these libraries, it means that those conservationists using eDNA to sample rewilding sites can be more confident about the results they are getting.

Collecting for the future

The paper also raises some interesting questions about how natural history museums might adapt to future changes in what is needed from collections. For example, with more focus and attention being brought on restoring and rewilding landscapes, there is a potential need for baseline environmental samples, like soil, water or acoustic soundscapes, to be stored in a standardised way and made accessible to researchers.

This would allow scientists and conservations to track how certain interventions, such as the introduction of large mammals, are impacting the ecosystem over time.

All this would require natural history museums to be actively collecting and storing these samples before any such actions were taken.

“Are there different kinds of collections we should be gathering?”, asks John. “If we were to look at collecting as a way to directly support nature recovery, is there a role for natural history museums to, for example, store baseline and periodic time-series samples from active nature recovery programmes?”

This could create modern collections with a direct nature recovery purpose that would benefit conservation science in a highly targeted way.

John is, however, quick to stress that any new form of collection would need to be in addition to, rather than instead of, the specimen collections that form the backbones of natural history museums. There is still an urgent need to continue to sensitively collect new specimens of animals and plants, so that future scientists can look back and see how the natural world has changed.

By asking these questions and opening up this discussion, Ken and John hope that researchers on both sides will be able to benefit from future partnerships.