Natural History Museum partners with AWS for biodiversity research push

The Natural History Museum has enlisted the assistance of public cloud large Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bolster its scientific research capabilities.

The museum mentioned the partnership will pave the best way for it to deliver collectively and retailer a broad vary of UK biodiversity and environmental knowledge in a single place to encourage cross-disciplinary research programmes and to allow its scientists to develop a deeper understanding of the pure world.

Specifically, the 2 organisations will develop a brand new knowledge platform, dubbed the Data Ecosystem, constructed utilizing AWS applied sciences and hosted inside its public cloud.

The Data Ecosystem might be made obtainable to the museum’s 350 scientists, in addition to researchers at its companion institutes throughout the UK.

“The Data Ecosystem will help researchers to build a deeper understanding of the UK’s urban biodiversity, including its composition, how it relates to environmental conditions, and how it responds to direct conservation action,” the businesses mentioned, in a joint assertion.  

“Scientists will be capable to examine biodiversity knowledge varieties alongside environmental knowledge corresponding to soil and atmospheric chemistry or noise air pollution, quickly and precisely.

“This, combined with access to the museum’s 27 years of historical wildlife data from their South Kensington gardens, will build an increasingly detailed picture of biodiversity functioning and health and is expected to open up large-scale opportunities for research and nature positive action.”

The Data Ecosystem’s capabilities may also be used to assist speed up the tempo of the biodiversity monitoring work the museum does, whereas AWS applied sciences may also be used to create an onsite studying and exercise centre and assist the work of its Urban Nature Project.

The initiative is geared in the direction of turning the museum’s five-acre website right into a biologically various inexperienced house by way of the creation of gardens that may present “living galleries” to help its scientists with their research. The gardens are attributable to open to the general public in 2023.

“Visual and environmental DNA-based observations of plants and wildlife, as well as environmental and acoustic monitoring data from a high spatial resolution sensor network in the Museum’s gardens will be curated and combined within the Data Ecosystem,” the assertion added.

“The richness of data will enable the museum’s scientists to build scientific evidence of the impacts that habitat creation, restoration, and translocation have on the UK’s urban wildlife, from grassland to pond habitats.”

In time, the hope is the Data Ecosystem will result in all new UK biodiversity and environmental knowledge from Natural History Museum initiatives getting used to create a real-time digital twin that may present a digital illustration of the UK’s pure environments and biodiversity.  

John Tweddle, head of the Angela Marmont Centre for UK Biodiversity on the Natural History Museum, mentioned: “Working with AWS to develop the Data Ecosystem will revolutionise the scientific work we undertake at the museum. The data will form an essential tool in unlocking new solutions to the planetary ecological emergency; from monitoring the UK’s wildlife to furthering science-informed nature recovery in our towns and cities.”

Darren Hardman, vice-president and common supervisor for the UK and Ireland at AWS, added: “Gaining entry to a variety of information is essential for the museum’s scientists to construct a greater understanding of the UK’s city biodiversity and assist deal with the planetary emergency. Cloud is a crucial enabler for this.

“For the first time, scientists will have a way to securely store and process research data using the Data Ecosystem, which can easily scale up as more and more data is collected over time. We’re looking forward to working with the museum to drive innovation across the organisation in the coming years as the partnership grows.”