Scanning the specimens is not a trivial process. Not only does each one need to be photographed, but the tiny labels containing important scientific information, often handwritten, sometimes centuries ago, also have to be recorded. <\/p>\n
The team involved calculated that it would have taken hundreds of years to do this manually, but using robots and AI this process can now be done in a decade, according to Sarah Addezio, the DiSSCo UK’s programme delivery director.<\/p>\n
“What we’re able to do now is connect and analyse that information at a scale that’s unprecedented and has not been possible before.”<\/p>\n
One hundred museums, botanic gardens, universities and other organisations are involved in the project. <\/p>\n
The specimens to go under the cameras will not be the big beasties: there are no whales or dinosaurs in the opening phase, which begins in Wales and Scotland. <\/p>\n
Beetles, butterflies, moths, flies, pressed flowers and ferns will go first – the small, less glamorous material that actually hold the best record of how the country around them has changed.<\/p>\n
In Cardiff, the team will scan around half a million insect and plant specimens, from large, showy butterflies down to flies you could lose on a fingertip, which turn out to be among the most sensitive indicators of a healthy landscape.<\/p>\n
In Scotland, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and National Museums Scotland hold 13 million specimens between them, the UK’s second-largest natural science collection. <\/p>\n
Together with 50 smaller Scottish collections, the collections span from sea level to the tops of mountains – two centuries of change in the plants and insects of every kind of Scottish landscape.<\/p>\n
Jenny Geroni, who is the head of Natural Sciences and Research at the Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, said it will be a chance to showcase material from across the country. <\/p>\n
“Each collection is unique. We have a lot of Welsh material that is not held anywhere else.<\/p>\n
“By taking material from across the UK, it also allows us to build a good picture of what is going on across the whole country. And everyone adding their world collections will build a much stronger picture of what is going on elsewhere,” Geroni told BBC News.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scanning the specimens is not a trivial process. Not only does each one need to be photographed, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":787245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-787244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=787244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/787245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=787244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=787244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=787244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}