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German Taxonomic Facility (DE-TAF)

PLEASE NOTE THAT DE TAF HAS EXCEEDED ITS ALLOCATION OF USERS FROM SYNTHESYS PARTNER INSTITUTIONS. IF YOU ARE BASED IN A SYNTHESYS PARTNER INSTITUTION*, PLEASE DO NOT APPLY TO DE TAF.
*See SYNTHESYS Access homepage for list of SYNTHESYS Partner institutions

Collections | Analytical facilities | Strengths of collections | Staff expertise

DE-TAF consists of two complementary institutions housed in two different universities. These are:

DE-TAF Partner Institutions

The Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) and the Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum (BGBM) are the two principal institutions of their kind in Germany. The extensive plant collections of the BGBM, among the most important in the world, are perfectly complemented by the vast zoological, palaeontological and mineralogical collections of the MfN, and both institutions house analytical facilities, libraries, galleries, staff and computer networks that are involved in a broad spectrum of research spanning the breadth of biosystematics and also involving geoscience.

Representing more than 500 years of collecting effort, DE-TAF has several unique strengths including, unrivalled collections of plant, animal and fossil material from central Europe, plant remains from ancient Egypt and fish, insect, fossil plant and meteorite collections that are not found in museums anywhere else in Europe.

The MfN, founded in 1770, was Germany's principal institution for housing, maintaining and studying natural history collections during the nineteenth century, when the government funded large interational expeditions that yielded spectacular numbers of new species from all over the world, hence the enormous number of type specimens (ca. 250,000). With relatively few losses during WWII, today the MfN is the largest animal (fossil and Recent) reference centre in Germany, with particular strengths in fossil vertebrates and Recent marine invertebrates, insects, birds, and fish. The MfN also houses one of the largest fossil plant collections in Europe and has an important seed collection. Following German reunification, access to the MfN has become much easier and it is rapidly regaining its former position as Germany's leading natural history museum.

The BGBM comprises one of the oldest botanic gardens and herbaria in Germany and the only purely botanical museum in Europe. It has a staff of 160 and is the major depository for botanical materials (both living and preserved) and botanical literature in Germany, and one of the major European botanical centres. The collections are universal, covering all major regions and groups, and represent the cumulative effort of 303 years of collecting (oldest specimen from 1700) and 469 years of publishing (oldest item from 1534).

The institutions are located in the suburban south-west (BGBM) and north-central Berlin (MfN) and are directly connected by a frequent underground rail service. Berlin has an inexpensive and highly efficient public transport system and is easily accessible from elsewhere in Europe.

Collections & Expertise
The collections of DE-TAF, all accessible to Users, are quantitatively and qualitatively among the five most important natural history collections worldwide.The collections comprise more than 30 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils and minerals, including a vast collection of living and more than 350,000 types.

DE-TAF collections

The collections are extensively curated and documented, specimens can be easily located and examined and an increasing part of the BGBM collections is digitised. Digitisation of MfN collections is well underway by staff members, reinforced through ten different projects within the GBIF initiative funded by the German Ministry of Research and Education.

The scientists working at DE-TAF represent a wide range of fields and form one of Europe's most important concentrations of expert knowledge in biosystematics. Many staff are among the leading international authorities in their field or represent unique expertise in Europe. Staff scientists are supported by a range of technicians with specialist knowledge of the collections, preparation and restoration skills, and training in imaging and IT. In most cases staff scientists are directly responsible for (and closely located to) a part of the collections that, simultaneously, forms a core element of their research programmes. Collectively, the scientific staff and technicians of DE-TAF  provide an expertise base that can train Users in specimen recognition, taxonomy, systematics and the use of technical facilities.

The huge libraries and archives of DE-TAF collectively contain more than one million volumes, thousands of rare works and some 5,000 periodicals. Their comprehensive coverage, especially with regard to literature from eastern Europe, Russia and the CIS, represents a unique resource within the central European area. The BGBM is a founding member of the EBHL (European Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Group) and also comprises the only special library for biology in Berlin that receives funding from the DFG. The  DE-TAF libraries are complemented by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, which holds a vast amount of scientific literature published across all fields and fully searchable on the Internet. This resource has worldwide coverage and spans several centuries. The Staatsbibliothek is conveniently sited on the underground line linking the two components of DE-TAF.

Supporting Analytical Facilities
Apart from standard laboratory tools, important research equipment including facilities for DNA extraction and analysis, and microprobe facilities are available in both institutions. Equipment at the MfN, housed in new state-of-the-art laboratories completed in the late 1990s and forming a unique array within a central European natural history museum, includes instruments for conducting X-ray fluorescence, X-ray diffraction, molecular sequencing and digital imaging. The vast conservatories at BGBM, some reserved exclusively for scientific study, and their living collections constitute a key asset of outstanding importance with a particularly high percentage of fully documented material collected in the wild and correlated with field data and herbarium specimens.

List of facilities (Excel)

Key strengths of the DE-TAF collections

Summary of unique/rare expertise represented by DE-TAF staff