The DINA Consortium is constituted of several international institutions and is open for new members.
Currently the partner institutions of the DINA Consortium are:
- Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa, CA (Core Member, founding member)
- Museum fur Naturkunde, Berlin, DE (Core Member, founding member)
- Übersee-Museum, Bremen, DE (Core Member)
- Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, UK (Associate Member, founding member)
- Station Linné, Färjestaden, SE (Associate Member)
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) is the department of the Government of Canada with responsibility for policies governing the production, processing, and marketing of all farm, food, and agri-based products. AAFC provides leadership in the growth and development of a competitive, innovative and sustainable Canadian agriculture and agri-food sector.
Within its Science and Technology Branch, AAFC maintains collections of living and preserved biological material. These add up to circa 19 million physical holdings of insects, plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses and nematodes as well as plant and animal reproductive material. The data from these reference collections supports Canada’s capacity for science-based decision-making by helping scientists identify new potential threats, better understand the origin, movement and migration patterns of pests and pathogens, and predict new potential pest threats that could emerge. They support research on pollinators and other beneficials, discovery of novel traits in crop relatives to enhance productivity, and the many other ecosystem services biodiversity provides at both macro and micro scales.
Core Participants
- James Macklin, Research Scientist: Botany and Biodiversity Informatics [International Steering Committee member]
- Satpal Bilkhu, Senior Project Manager, Integrated Services Branch [Chair, Technical Committee]
- Christian Gendreau, Senior Software Architect, Integrated Services Branch [Technical Committee member]
- David Shorthouse, Biodiversity Data Manager, Biological Collections [Technical Committee member]
Museum für Naturkunde
The Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) is one of eight research museums in the “Leibniz Association”, one of four large non-university research organizations in Germany. It is one of the most significant research institutions worldwide in biological and geo-scientific evolution research and biodiversity. Our research is collections-based and our collections comprise more than 30 million items relating to zoology, paleontology, geology and mineralogy, which have been compiled continuously for over 200 years and are highly significant for science as well as for the history of science. Thus, the MfN is an integrated research museum with strong national and international partnerships and networks and our public engagement is science-driven.
Mission
Discovering and describing life and earth – with people, through dialogue.
Vision
As an excellent research museum and innovative communication platform, we want to engage with and influence the scientific and societal discourse about the future of our planet – worldwide.
Website
https://www.naturkundemuseum-berlin.de
- Jana Hoffmann (DINA ISC)
- Falko Glöckler (DINA TC)
Übersee-Museum
As a multi-disciplinary institution, the Übersee Museum has natural history collections, ethnographic collections, collections on Bremen’s trade history, and an extensive collection of historical photographs, which in some cases also document collection contexts and are also closely linked to the colonial collection contexts. Furthermore, the museum has a library with extensive colonial literature and a file archive on the history of the house, which support the research of the collection contexts.
The disclosure of collection contexts (documentation of collectors, geographic metadata, and provenance characteristics) is an important task and challenge for the interdisciplinary collection areas with their sometimes different technical requirements for collection documentation. It requires the cross-asset networking of collection information for the requirements of promising provenance research and the creation of transparency, which is an important concern for the Übersee-Museum, which is involved and exchanges information in professional networks in this regard.
Since 2012, ethnographic and trade collections as well as the Historical Picture Archive have been recorded in the Collections Management System TMS (initially TMS 2012, after the last further development in version 2018). The 83,130 ethnographic objects are fully digitally recorded in the database with varying levels of indexing. In the Department of Trade Studies, nearly 4,900 of about 30,000 objects are recorded in TMS 2018. For the Historical Image Archive, around 34,000 objects are recorded in the database, which is approximately two-thirds of the total holdings. Of the circa 1 million natural history objects/organisms, 251,424 objects are digitally recorded, of which 2,755 (herbarium specimens) have standardized digital images. Additional natural history objects are to be digitally recorded as part of a project funding.
Networking and open use of collection information is the core of the Übersee-Museum’s digital strategy.
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) was founded in the 17th century as a physic garden. Now it extends over four Gardens boasting a rich living collection of plants, and is a world-renowned centre for plant science and education.
Mission
“Exploring and explaining the world of plants for a better future”
Without plants, there would be no life on earth. RBGE has been growing and studying plants for over 330 years, and so is perfectly placed to help document and conserve the world’s diversity of plantlife.
The RBGE is working with the DINA project as part of information technology and collections management solutions at RBGE.
People involved
- David Harris - Curator of the Herbarium
- Elspeth Haston - Deputy Curator of the Herbarium
- Robert Cubey - Plant Records Officer
- Marios Theodoropoulos - Programmer
Station Linné
Station Linné is a research station on the island of Öland. The station was founded in 1963 by Uppsala University. It is organized since 2009 as a non-profit foundation, the Station Linné Foundation. Each summer, Station Linné welcomes more than 100 researchers and students from Sweden, northern Europe and beyond. The research projects span a wide range of research topics, including ecology, entomology and botany but also geology, archaeology, social sciences and many others.
Since 2006, the station has hosted a permanent team focused on taxonomic and ecological research on insect faunas. It started with the Swedish Malaise Trap Project, which at the time was one of the most ambitious inventories of a national insect fauna that had ever been attempted. It used a large number of Malaise traps deployed across Sweden for three full years (2003-2006). In recent years, the Station has been a key partner in projects charting insect faunas using genetic analysis (DNA metabarcoding) of large numbers of Malaise trap samples. The Station hosts unique collections of taxonomically sorted material of poorly known insect groups from Malaise traps in Sweden, and Malaise trap samples that have gone through mild lysis and the content of which has been indexed through DNA metabarcoding. Station Linné is also organizing one of the first monitoring schemes for insects using continuous sampling with Malaise traps and DNA sequencing of the collected material.
Website
https://stationlinne.se