Unlocking the Vault: Digitizing Collections To Understand Global Biodiversity

Sustainable ecosystems management depends upon the availability of information about the variation of biodiversity. Natural history collections are a vital source of these data, holding billions of specimens collected over three centuries, each witness to past ecological conditions and historic distributions. This presentation will show how collection organizations are using digitization to unlock the vaults of their collections and develop tools to map, monitor and understand the natural world.