The Value of Natural History Museums

Natural History Museums are centers of research, education, and public outreach. While many people think of natural history museums as places for public entertainment, the importance of museum research collections for documenting historical and present-day patterns of biological diversity cannot be overstated.

In the MVZ, our collections house over 150 years of biological history and are used by researchers for a myriad of studies. Fundamentally, our collections document the presence of particular species at a particular place and time. This allows us to examine geographic and temporal changes in animal populations, species, and communities, and to track those patterns in relation to natural or human-induced changes in the environment (e.g., climate change, landscape alteration, etc.).

Museum specimens form the basis for research on evolution, speciation, and distribution, and also provide an important baseline for studies of conservation and emerging diseases (e.g., hantavirus, West Nile Virus, chytridiomycosus, to name a few). Specimens and their associated data (e.g., field notes of habitat, recordings of song, reproductive and age information, etc.) also provide information on natural and life history traits of animals.

Examples of past and present uses of the MVZ collections include:

  • Tracking historical changes in animal populations and communities in Yosemite National Park and elsewhere in California (Grinnell Resurvey Project)
  • Linking the effects of pesticides (DDT and DDE) to eggshell thinning in birds, which caused reproductive failure and population declines in Brown Pelicans, Peregrine Falcons, and other species. This led to banning these pesticides in the USA
  • Illustrating species and their distributions for field guides and other natural history books
  • Using tissue samples collected from rodents in the 1970’s to better understand the occurrence and distribution of hantavirus
  • Using historical museum skins to track the impact of avian malaria on Hawaiian birds
  • Tracking the global disease dynamics of chytridiomycosus in amphibians

For more information, see our bibliography on the Value of Natural History Museums, which is available as a Zotero Group library for sharing.

Potter, S., Moritz, C., Piggott, M. P., Bragg, J. G., Afonso Silva, A. C., Bi, K., McDonald-Spicer, C., Turakulov, R., & Eldridge, M. D. B. (2024). Museum Skins Enable Identification of Introgression Associated with Cytonuclear Discordance. Systematic Biology, syae016. https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syae016
Toussaint, E. F. A., FLS, Gillett, C. P. D. T., & Löbl, I. (2024). The fate of natural history museums in the face of good intentions. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, blae012. https://doi.org/10.1093/biolinnean/blae012
Nachman, M. W., Beckman, E. J., Bowie, R. C., Cicero, C., Conroy, C. J., Dudley, R., Hayes, T. B., Koo, M. S., Lacey, E. A., Martin, C. H., McGuire, J. A., Patton, J. L., Spencer, C. L., Tarvin, R. D., Wake, M. H., Wang, I. J., Achmadi, A., Álvarez-Castañeda, S. T., Andersen, M. J., … Zink, R. M. (2023). Specimen collection is essential for modern science. PLOS Biology, 21(11), e3002318. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002318
Rohwer, V. G., Rohwer, Y., & Dillman, C. B. (2022). Declining growth of natural history collections fails future generations. PLOS Biology, 20(4), e3001613. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001613
Colella, J. P., Bates, J., Burneo, S. F., Camacho, M. A., Bonilla, C. C., Constable, I., D’Elía, G., Dunnum, J. L., Greiman, S., Hoberg, E. P., Lessa, E., Liphardt, S. W., Londoño-Gaviria, M., Losos, E., Lutz, H. L., Garza, N. O., Peterson, A. T., Martin, M. L., Ribas, C. C., … Cook, J. A. (2021). Leveraging natural history biorepositories as a global, decentralized, pathogen surveillance network. PLOS Pathogens, 17(6), e1009583. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1009583
Grinnell, J. (2021). The museum conscience [originally published in: Museum Work 4:62–63, 1922]. Journal of Mammalogy, 102(1), 8–9. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyaa156
de Siracusa, P. C., Gadelha, L. M. R., & Ziviani, A. (2020). New perspectives on analysing data from biological collections based on social network analytics. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 3358. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-60134-y
Bakker, F. T., Antonelli, A., Clarke, J. A., Cook, J. A., Edwards, S. V., Ericson, P. G. P., Faurby, S., Ferrand, N., Gelang, M., Gillespie, R. G., Irestedt, M., Lundin, K., Larsson, E., Matos-Maraví, P., Müller, J., Proschwitz, T. von, Roderick, G. K., Schliep, A., Wahlberg, N., … Källersjö, M. (2020). The Global Museum: natural history collections and the future of evolutionary science and public education. PeerJ, 8, e8225. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8225
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2020). “Biological Collections: Ensuring Critical Research and Education for the 21st Century” at NAP.edu. https://www.nap.edu/read/25592/chapter/1
Schmitt, C. J., Cook, J. A., Zamudio, K. R., & Edwards, S. V. (2019). Museum specimens of terrestrial vertebrates are sensitive indicators of environmental change in the Anthropocene. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 374(1763), 20170387. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0387
Marshall, C. R., Finnegan, S., Clites, E. C., Holroyd, P. A., Bonuso, N., Cortez, C., Davis, E., Dietl, G. P., Druckenmiller, P. S., Eng, R. C., Garcia, C., Estes-Smargiassi, K., Hendy, A., Hollis, K. A., Little, H., Nesbitt, E. A., Roopnarine, P., Skibinski, L., Vendetti, J., & White, L. D. (2018). Quantifying the dark data in museum fossil collections as palaeontology undergoes a second digital revolution. Biology Letters, 14(9), 20180431. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2018.0431
Drew, J. A., Moreau, C. S., & Stiassny, M. L. J. (2017). Digitization of museum collections holds the potential to enhance researcher diversity. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 1(12), 1789–1790. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0401-6
Hiller, A. E., Cicero, C., Albe, M. J., Barclay, T. L. W., Spencer, C. L., Koo, M. S., Bowie, R. C. K., & Lacey, E. A. (2017). Mutualism in museums: A model for engaging undergraduates in biodiversity science. PLOS Biology, 15(11), e2003318. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2003318
D’Elia, J., Haig, S. M., Mullins, T. D., & Miller, M. P. (2016). Ancient DNA reveals substantial genetic diversity in the California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) prior to a population bottleneck. The Condor, 118(4), 703–714. https://doi.org/10.1650/CONDOR-16-35.1
Runte, A. (2016, September 18). “Animal Life As An Asset Of National Parks,” A Path-Breaking Essay. https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2016/09/animal-life-asset-national-parks-path-breaking-essay
La Salle, J., Williams, K., & Moritz, C. (2016). Biodiversity analysis in the digital era. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0337
Rogers, N. (2016). Museum drawers go digital. Science, 352(6287), 762–765. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.352.6287.762
Holmes, M. W., Hammond, T. T., Wogan, G. O. U., Walsh, R. E., LaBarbera, K., Wommack, E. A., Martins, F. M., Crawford, J. C., Mack, K. L., Bloch, L. M., & Nachman, M. W. (2016). Natural history collections as windows on evolutionary processes. Molecular Ecology, 25(4), 864–881. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.13529
Buerki, S., & Baker, W. J. (2016). Collections-based research in the genomic era. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 117(1), 5–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/bij.12721
Kemp, C. (2015). Museums: The endangered dead. Nature, 518(7539), 292–294. https://doi.org/10.1038/518292a
Cook, J. A., Edwards, S. V., Lacey, E. A., Guralnick, R. P., Soltis, P. S., Soltis, D. E., Welch, C. K., Bell, K. C., Galbreath, K. E., Himes, C., Allen, J. M., Heath, T. A., Carnaval, A. C., Cooper, K. L., Liu, M., Hanken, J., & Ickert-Bond, S. (2014). Natural History Collections as Emerging Resources for Innovative Education. BioScience, 64(8), 725–734. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu096
Collections in the News: In the News: Preserving Collections and their Museums. (2014). http://blog.scicoll.org/2014/11/follow-friday_28.html
Bi, K., Linderoth, T., Vanderpool, D., Good, J. M., Nielsen, R., & Moritz, C. (2013). Unlocking the vault: next-generation museum population genomics. Molecular Ecology, 22(24), 6018–6032. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.12516
Nachman, M. W. (2013). Genomics and museum specimens. Molecular Ecology, 22(24), 5966–5968. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.12563
Smith, A. B., Santos, M. J., Koo, M. S., Rowe, K. M. C., Rowe, K. C., Patton, J. L., Perrine, J. D., Beissinger, S. R., & Moritz, C. (2013). Evaluation of species distribution models by resampling of sites surveyed a century ago by Joseph Grinnell. Ecography, no-no. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0587.2013.00107.x
Fontaine, B., Perrard, A., & Bouchet, P. (2012). 21 years of shelf life between discovery and description of new species. Current Biology, 22(22), R943–R944. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.10.029
Thomer, A., Vaidya, G., Guralnick, R., Bloom, D., & Russell, L. (2012). From documents to datasets: A MediaWiki-based method of annotating and extracting species observations in century-old field notebooks. ZooKeys, 209(0), 235–253. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.209.3247
Drew, J. (2011). The Role of Natural History Institutions and Bioinformatics in Conservation Biology. Conservation Biology, 25(6), 1250–1252. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2011.01725.x
Lips, K. R. (2011). Museum collections: Mining the past to manage the future. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(23), 9323–9324. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1107246108
Baker, B. (2011). New Push to Bring US Biological Collections to the World’s Online Community. BioScience, 61, 657–662. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2011.61.9.4
Johnson, K. G., Brooks, S. J., Fenberg, P. B., Glover, A. G., James, K. E., Lister, A. M., Michel, E., Spencer, M., Todd, J. A., Valsami-Jones, E., Young, J. R., & Stewart, J. R. (2011). Climate Change and Biosphere Response: Unlocking the Collections Vault. BioScience, 61(2), 147–153. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2011.61.2.10
Pearson, D. L., Hamilton, A. L., & Erwin, T. L. (2011). Recovery Plan for the Endangered Taxonomy Profession. BioScience, 61(1), 58–63. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2011.61.1.11
Mason, B. (2011). Beautiful Data: The Art of Science Field Notes. WIRED. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/science-field-notes-gallery/?pid=1622&viewall=true
Feeley, K. J., & Silman, M. R. (2011). Keep collecting: accurate species distribution modelling requires more collections than previously thought. Diversity and Distributions, 17(6). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1472-4642.2011.00813.x
Hekkala, E., Shirley, M. H., Amato, G., Austin, J. D., Charter, S., Thorbjarnarson, J., Vliet, K. A., Houck, M. L., Desalle, R., & Blum, M. J. (2011). An ancient icon reveals new mysteries: mummy DNA resurrects a cryptic species within the Nile crocodile. Molecular Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-294X.2011.05245.x
Baird, R. C. (2010). Leveraging the fullest potential of scientific collections through digitisation. Biodiversity Informatics, 7(2). https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.17161/bi.v7i2.3987
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Boakes, E. H., McGowan, P. J. K., Fuller, R. A., Chang-qing, D., Clark, N. E., O’Connor, K., & Mace, G. M. (2010). Distorted Views of Biodiversity: Spatial and Temporal Bias in Species Occurrence Data. PLOS Biol, 8(6), e1000385. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000385
Ilerbaig, J. (2010). Specimens as Records: Scientific Practice and Recordkeeping in Natural History Research. American Archivist, 73(2), 463–482. http://archivists.metapress.com/content/607470V482172220
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