by Jen Pullar
5 min read
Who’s using our UK Natural Science data and why?
The UK is home to some of the world’s largest and most significant natural history collections. To show how these collections are already being used to tackle some of the most fundamental questions of our time, the DiSSCo UK team has published a Year 0 Science Review.
DiSSCo UK is set to transform the digitisation of UK collections by bringing together the collections of 100 institutions to create one of the world’s largest natural history assets. This is a major 10 year investment funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and delivered by the Museum and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The programme will digitise and connect these collections, creating an AI-ready national data infrastructure.
Ahead of the formal launch of the ten-year programme, the DiSSCo UK Year 0 Science Review captures how digitised UK natural science collections are already contributing to research. The review brings together examples from across disciplines that show how specimen data are helping scientists understand how life responds to environmental change, how diseases emerge and spread, and how we can improve food and energy security for a growing population.
The science review highlights several studies that use digitised natural science collections to understand how species and ecosystems respond to environmental change. This can be used to inform research on ecosystem services, invasive species, food security and more. The review also highlights how digitisation is enabling new forms of data-driven research, particularly through advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Nature under pressure
The Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate and experiencing long-term shifts in weather patterns. Fossil pollen offers important insights into past climates and helps predict how global warming may shift seasonal patterns in the UK. A study by McCoy et al published in Palaeontologia Electronica reconstructs the climate of the British Isles during the mid-Cenozoic era (33.9–15.97 million years ago).
By analysing fossil pollen, spores, and modern plant records, researchers showed that the region experienced substantial climate variability, shifting between temperate, subtropical, and tropical conditions. These reconstructions help scientists better predict how rising CO₂ levels and human-driven climate change may shape future regional climates, suggesting the UK is likely to face wetter summers and warmer winters.
Understanding these past climate shifts is essential because biodiversity is also changing rapidly today. Species across the UK and around the world are moving, adapting, or declining in response to environmental pressures. To understand what’s happening and why, we need long-term evidence. Natural science collections provide that record, showing where species once lived and how they interacted with their environments.
A long-term study by Steward et al analysed data about the brown argus butterfly (Aricia agestis) from 1970 to 2018. Researchers tracked changes in the species distribution and combined these records with information on both ancestral and recently adopted host plants, as well as temperature and rainfall data. This allowed them to model how life‑cycle timing and population growth have shifted over nearly five decades.
Researchers found that the butterflies’ northward expansion has been driven by tight synchrony with its host plants. Delayed egg‑laying and larval emergence helped the species align with novel hosts, boosting productivity and enabling rapid range growth into new areas. However, as temperatures rise, the butterfly emerges earlier each year. This threatens to push life stages out of sync with peak food availability, reducing survival rates and undermining population resilience.
Combining digitised collections with modern monitoring data enables scientists to track trends over decades or even centuries. This helps reveal which species are expanding, which are declining, and how ecosystems are responding to pressures like climate change and habitat loss.
Protecting our ecosystems
Ensuring access to sufficient, nutritious food is essential for human wellbeing, but global food systems are under increasing pressure from climate change, pollution, water scarcity, land degradation, and overconsumption.
A study by Pérez et al, published in Ecosystem Services showed that invasive plant species could increasingly threaten biodiversity and vital ecosystem services across the UK and mainland Europe. Using digitised museum specimens and biodiversity observations, researchers modelled the future spread of four high‑risk invasive plants. Their results show that crop production, soil erosion control, and native biodiversity were predicted to be the most severely affected ecosystem services.
Another major and growing challenge within this landscape is the spread of invasive species. With more than 3,000 invasive species now recorded in the UK, their impacts on agriculture, habitats, and the wider economy continue to intensify, posing risks to both food security and ecosystem health.
A study by Phillips et al highlights how protecting wild species closely related to cereal crops could be key to future food security. Over thousands of years of domestication, crops like wheat, barley, oat and rye have lost much of their genetic diversity. This makes them more vulnerable to climate change, drought, pests and disease. Their wild relatives still carry valuable traits that could help build more resilient crops, but only if these species and their habitats are conserved.
As environmental change increasingly affects human health and food systems, crop wild relatives becomes even more vital. Improving access to herbarium specimens through digitisation will help fill data gaps and support accurate conservation assessments to support the resilience of crops and preventing the spread of invasive species.
Data innovation
Transforming analogue specimens into digital opens new opportunities for research. Advances in artificial intelligence and data science are accelerating this transformation. Machine learning enables automated transcription, image-based identification and quality assurance at scale, while AI-driven analytics, knowledge graphs and predictive models support new ways of extracting data.
Weaver et al have designed a new tool called LeafMachine2, a suite of machine learning algorithms that work simultaneously to identify, isolate, and extract leaf traits from images of plant specimens. This represents a significant advancement in automated plant trait extraction, offering a scalable, efficient, and adaptable tool for botanical research.
The authors advocate for infrastructure improvements that can manage the vast quantities of machine-derived trait data that will be generated in the future and emphasise the importance of standardised digitisation practices, highlighting the benefits of a collaborative nationwide programme where workflows and best practice are shared and monitored.
When we unlock the data held within the UK’s natural science collections, we unlock entirely new ways of understanding our planet, our health, and our future. Digitised specimens become dynamic datasets driving real-world impact.
This Year 0 Science Review marks the beginning of this journey. As more collections become digitally accessible, we will track how the programme continues to expand the reach and impact of UK natural science collections.
As DiSSCo UK moves into its formal launch phase, the opportunities ahead are immense. This joined-up national resource will help researchers answer questions we can’t yet imagine, and provide the robust, long-term datasets needed to inform decision-making, shape environmental resilience, and deepen our understanding of a rapidly changing world.