1.1 Billion Objects and Counting: Inside the Effort to Tally Natural History Specimens Around the Globe #museum #naturalhistory #smithsonian #collections

A small fraction of the more than 50 million specimens housed in the museum’s invertebrate zoology collection. Chip Clark, NMNH

Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article about the effort to count the world's museum collections.

With more than 148 million specimens and objects ranging from pocket-sized shrews and glimmering crystals to petrified tree trunks and giant squid, the National Museum of Natural History holds a sprawling account of how Earth has changed over the past 4.5 billion years.

According to Kirk Johnson, the museum’s Sant Director, many of these specimens help researchers forecast the planet’s uncertain future. “We're seeing rapid change in the natural world and these collections are the only place to see certain aspects of nature,” Johnson said. Because the collections contain ecological relics like extinct species, they reveal how life responded to past environmental changes and how it may fare in the future.

Johnson champions the crucial role natural history collections play in charting our planet’s future in this precarious epoch. But even a collection as large as the museum’s only reveals snippets of the planet’s ongoing story. The gaps in knowledge prevent scientists and policy makers from making the most informed decisions possible.