Skip to page content

Primary navigation

Developing the collections

The department has identified areas where the collections represent an increasingly important and unique resource:

  • within the context of global climate change and the biodiversity crisis
  • as time series

To make full use of the collections, programmes of action need to be implemented.

Global climate change and the biodiversity crisis

The pace of change and biodiversity loss is accelerating. With the increasing threats to the world’s biodiversity, endangered and recently extinct material is likely to become an increasing proportion of our collection and become increasingly important.

Future plans

An active policy of identifying such taxa should be developed, and where appropriate an ethical and legal field programme be developed.

Active support of the Frozen Ark initiative will enhance the collection of samples from endangered animals suitable for genomic analysis.

Time series

There are many areas of the zoology collections which represent a unique resource because they are either examples of regular sampling or they were collected before the advent of modern industrial polluting processes.

Avian examples of the importance of time series include:

  • the study of organo-chlorine pesticide impact through both eggshell thinning and extraction of DDE from eggshell membranes
  • the study of changes in mercury pollution of the seas through analysis of seabird feathers
Future work

While not all parts of the collection are able to function as time series there may be areas which, if a programme of sampling was now undertaken, could be developed as useful resources with which to assess global change. For example, geographical regions with good representative coverage could be used in future studies as the ‘before’ sample.

To enable such programmes to work effectively more of the collections need to be databased. The development of a back-capture databasing programme for the collections is required.

Print version