Sharing Data through the natural heritage information infrastructure of the Luxembourg National Museum of Natural History

Today our staff got an introduction on where our national natural history data come from, why we collect them and how they are used. This work is assured by our department ”Information sur le patrimoine naturel” at the museum . Raffael Mancini is part of that team and brought the rest of us up to date on the topic.

“There is a lot of data out there but we don’t always have it”

Mostly it’s about modelling nature: living beings, biotopes, fossils, minerals,…. To do this, Raffael and his colleagues need certain media types: Observations, specimen records, images, sounds, DNA sequences, chemical analysis,… Depending on the information the collection process can be either

• simple: timestamp, location, author, species
• or complex: for example human observations - what was observed and by how many people? was there a specimen that got collected? What state is it in? restored or treated?…

Why does the museum collect natural heritage data?

It’s about data conservation and research – two important missions of the Luxembourg National Museum of Natural History. These data can be used to model and fight pest and diseases, and to help policymakers by compiling red lists of threatened species, defining protection zones or understanding and fighting neobiota (= non-native plants). There are also administrative and commercial professionals that use these data to issue building permits, produce drugs, mining,… Finally yet importantly, 3D scans and information about animals and plants are used in the gaming industry to build realistic environments.

There are a few challenges the team regularly faces. Taxonomy is very important and is regularly updated, so there can be lots of synonyms, mappings, and changes that need to be considered. Georeferencing can be difficult too, if based on past location-names. Also, there can be authors disambiguation, sensitive data,…

What about the future?

Raffael and the department are constantly updating and filling the national databases. Furthermore they are working on improving the user experience of the databases to adapt to the growing needs of the scientific, professional and public users.

Currently, you can find the data of the museum on https://mdata.mnhn.lu/ and gbif.org. If you want to contribute, please send us your data via: iNaturalist, ObsIdentify, or E-mail to [email protected]