Curation and Biodiversity Informatics

About this programme

The maintenance of museum specimens and catalogues demands great expertise and handling skills. This course introduces core collection procedures, documentation standards, and database management methods, with a clear progression from data generation to data use. The preservation of natural history collections, together with proper documentation, digitization and accessibility, is crucial to meeting today’s societal and scientific challenges. These collections represent a vast reservoir of biodiversity data that can be used to inform conservation strategies, understand species evolution and ecosystem complexity, and assess the impacts of climate and environmental change. Week 1 focuses on specimen curation and collection management, including preservation methods, documentation practices, and the role of collections in research and society. Week 2 addresses data mobilization and data standards (data in). Students work with digitization workflows, metadata, data quality, and international standards for biodiversity data, as well as principles such as FAIR and CARE. The emphasis is on preparing and structuring data for integration and publication in national and international repositories. Week 3 focuses on data use (data out). This part of the course centers on retrieving, processing, analyzing, and interpreting biodiversity data using R. Students work with reproducible workflows and computational tools to explore patterns, assess data quality, and generate meaningful biological insights.