by Tara Wainwright
5 min read
The DiSSCo UK Full Business Case has been approved by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, unlocking £155.6 million to digitise the UK’s natural science collections. The programme is funded through the UKRI Infrastructure Fund and will be delivered through the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with the Natural History Museum.
We have been working towards this goal for over five years, gathering evidence to support the need for a national programme and demonstrating the impact of our digital collections. Over the next decade, DiSSCo UK will make around half of the UK’s 140+ million natural science specimens digitally accessible. This includes creating millions of new digital specimen records, mobilising existing data, and bringing unpublished collections information into wider use.
Alongside mass digitisation, the funding will also create a new technical infrastructure for the storage, publishing, and access of UK specimen data, and a catalysis centre that will explore commercialisation opportunities and optimise digitisation workflows through innovative technologies.
Where UK Collections Come Together
DiSSCo UK will operate through a hub and node model, where larger organisations with existing capacity digitise their own collections and support smaller ‘nodal’ collections with their digitisation.
Four rounds of funding throughout the 10-years will target different collection types, sizes, and regions, ensuring representation across UK collections. The first funded organisations will begin digitising this year and continue until 2028. Over these next two years, four hubs covering 17 collections will digitise parts of their botany and entomology collections. The next round of applications for future funding will open in 2027, with digitisation starting in 2028.
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and National Museums of Scotland are co-hosting a national hub to digitise natural science collections in Scotland. They will be digitising the national collections at the hubs in tandem with node partners’ collections - starting with Glasgow Life, Shetland Museum, the Hunterian and James Hutton Institute, and expanding to many more in future.
Amgueddfa Cymru and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery are partnering with National Museums Northern Ireland, the National Botanic Garden of Wales, and Museum Development South West to unite expertise across three nations. Together, this hub will digitise approximately 500,000 botanical and entomological specimens, supporting taxonomic and conservation research across collections of significant scientific value. The priorities for botanical collections are taxonomically complex groups, threatened and climate-sensitive species, and invasive or non-native flora. Entomological collections to be digitised span Diptera (Flies), Heteroptera (True Bugs) and Lepidoptera (Butterflies and Moths), with priority given to groups of significant biodiversity, medical and economic importance.
The University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford have formed a partnership to establish a hub in Central England. The partnership has proven to be like bringing two halves of a jigsaw puzzle together. With complimentary skills, experience and collections it has enabled an exciting and ambitious project that links together the hubs with a diverse portfolio of regional node partners. Teams at both Universities will be focusing on British Collections material to unlock a wealth of data on ecologically important species being used by researchers, investigating subjects such as land management, conservation and food security.
The Natural History Museum will act as the central coordinator for the programme, overseeing the programme management, infrastructure, and benefits realisation. In the first two years, the NHM has prioritised botanical collections that include ecologically and economically vital plant groups that support food security, conservation, and ecosystem monitoring. The entomological collections that will be digitised are scientifically diverse and include major agricultural pests, bioindicators, and model organisms for studying biodiversity change.
DiSSCo UK will transform our natural science collections into a powerful, shared resource that can reshape research by improving efficiencies and enabling research on a greater scale. With over 18 million specimens currently available on the DiSSCo UK data portal, our data is already contributing to critical research, with usage growing yearly. The Year 0 Science Review highlights the impact of digitised collections, demonstrating how our data can be used to predict species responses to climate change, identify causes of biodiversity loss and disease transmission, and solve global challenges such as food insecurity and decarbonisation. By improving awareness and accessibility to UK collections, the impact for science and society will continue to grow.