Britain's historic natural science collections stand as enduring monuments to patient, empirical observation. On 15 July the University of Cambridge announced a partnership with the University of Oxford that will digitise more than 1.1 million specimens and knit them into a national network designed to deliver verifiable data for generations of researchers.
The initiative forms part of the DiSSCo UK programme, a ten-year undertaking funded with £155 million that aims to make around half of the country's more than 140 million natural science specimens digitally accessible. Cambridge has secured £772,000 to establish the Central England DiSSCo UK Hub, which will support 23 museums and herbaria across the region over the next two years.
The project will contribute 1,195,419 specimen records using high-throughput imaging and artificial intelligence technologies. It unites four major institutions: the Cambridge University Herbarium, the University Museum of Zoology Cambridge, the Museum of Natural History University of Oxford, and the Oxford University Herbaria. Additional digitising nodes sit at Norwich Castle Museum and the University of Leicester Herbarium, alongside a wider preparatory network.
Together the two ancient universities steward more than 12 million specimens, the largest such collection in the United Kingdom outside London and Edinburgh. The specimens chosen for this phase are British plants and insects gathered over the past two centuries, with particular attention paid to material from East and Southeast England. These records will form a high-resolution historical baseline against which future shifts in distribution and phenology can be measured.
Continuity of British botanical scholarship
Dr Stuart Desjardins of the University of Leicester Herbarium underlined the depth of institutional memory the project draws upon.
The three university herbaria included in the project (Oxford, Cambridge and Leicester) represent a remarkable continuity in British botanical science, bringing together the authors and reference material that underpin virtually every major flora of the British Isles over the past century: from George Claridge Druce’s List of British Plants at Oxford, through Tom Tutin’s Flora of the British Isles and Clive Stace’s New Flora of the British Isles at Leicester, to Peter Sell and Gina Murrell’s Flora of Great Britain and Ireland at Cambridge.
The resulting data will be released without restriction through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, allowing researchers worldwide to draw on precisely documented physical objects rather than abstracted projections.
