Enzo Pérès-Labourdette

The New York Times has an opinion piece about the importance of natural history museums and their collections.  Museums have been under pressure recently with budget cutbacks, changing focus, and government regulations.  That has put their collections in danger.  These collections are even more important today, as the Earth undergoes an extinction event caused by human activity and human induced climate change.  Many species of plants, animals, and fungi are disappearing before they can be completely catalogued.  Fortunately, many of these species exist in these collections.   Natural history collections are as important to modern biologists as libraries are to journalists and historians.

A taxonomist looking for minute differences between species, and a biogeographer investigating species distributions across a landscape, will find the same specimen valuable for different reasons, as will an evolutionary biologist resolving the interconnectedness and history of life, and an ecologist piecing together the intricate functions of whole ecosystems. These collections are particularly critical in today’s era of rapid ecological and climate change, providing a unique and vitally important glimpse into ecological conditions of the past.

In the same way that students of the humanities use new critical approaches to pull novel ideas out of old books, scientists regularly use new technologies — like stable isotope analysis, high-throughput DNA sequencing and X-ray computed tomography — to draw new discoveries from sometimes centuries-old specimens. The never-ending story of every specimen continues to unfold for as long as it is cared for, but threats to this care have recently accelerated.

In October 2014, a Smithsonian botanist and curator named Vicki Funk cataloged recent budgetary and curatorial cutbacks at several of our nation’s premier natural history museums, including the Field Museum in Chicago, the California Academy of Sciences and the New York State Museum. The curatorial staff at the Field Museum dropped by almost half, to 21 from 39, between 2001 and 2014, and that’s at a relatively well-funded American institution.