Michelle Price
Michelle Price, Head Curator of Cryptogams, Botanic Garden Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Michelle Price is a bryologist and herbarium curator in the Botanic Garden Geneva, Switzerland, with over 25 years of experience in collections management, bryological research, training and public outreach. She holds a PhD in Evolution, Ecology and Systematics from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Missouri Botanical Garden (MO), St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and a Masters from . She is interested in natural history collections and particularly in community building and the creation of platforms for exchange and collaboration between natural history institutions. With a strong focus on the power of communication and cooperation to further collective goals, she spent ten years as president of the Consortium for European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) where she led the implementation of the first strategic development plan for the association and focused on promoting collaborations within the natural history institution community from across Europe. More recently, she joined the board of the Swiss association for natural history institutions, Musnatcoll.ch, and was part of the development team of the Federally funded Swiss Collections Network initiative (SwissCollNet) that aimed to promote the digital access to natural history collections from across Switzerland. To ensure the representation of herbaria within the natural history institution community in Switzerland, she is the current co-coordinator of the SwissHerbaria initiative of the Swiss Botanical Society and Musnatcoll.ch.
Abstract
Promoting natural history collections and access to them: the importance of the community, collaborations, networking, and exchange.
Botanic Garden Geneva, Chemin de l’Impératrice 1, 1292 Pregny-Chambèsy, Geneva, Switzerland
In terms of biodiversity, natural history collections are physical repositories of biological specimens or objects that provide irreplaceable scientific evidence for interpreting the natural world. They play a key role in underpinning taxonomy and species discovery as well as providing sources of chemical, morphological-anatomical, structural, biological, and genetic data that are essential for building up our understanding of species, where they are found, how they evolved, and how they are related. The importance of the wealth of information on species, held in the ‘global natural history collection,’ to a range of scientific fields (e.g., ecology, conservation biology) is undeniable. Although much of the information on and derived from specimens remains as ‘dark data,’ global eƯorts are underway to provide digital access to specimens and their associated metadata, and to mobilize and aggregate this data, with a focus on making it freely and openly available for science. Natural history institutions play a key role in the stewardship of natural history collections, with the behind-the-scenes curation and digitisation of specimens essential for their long-term well-being and for ensuring their accessibility and scientific use, thereby increasing their scientific relevance. One of the important keystones for progress is cooperation, with knowledge sharing, skill transfer, information exchange and collaborations, ensuring that no one is left behind. When institutions work together under commonly agreed objectives and pull together to create a dynamic platform for communication, cooperation and collaboration, the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts, and community-wide strategic goals can be established. Opportunities can be created through collaboration, with outcomes providing numerous benefits for the natural history institution community as well as for the broader stakeholders in biodiversity data. Using examples from the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), the Swiss Association for Natural History Institutions, the Swiss Collections Network (SwissCollNet) and the working group SwissHerbaria, community-building between natural history institutions and the importance of the maintenance of these communities over the long term will be explored.