News & Events

Following the UK referendum vote on membership of the European Union, the Natural History Museum reaffirms its commitment to continue to work in European and global partnerships.

The implications of the result of the referendum are not yet clear and UK government decisions on exit from the EU have yet to be made. Indications are that the process of exit will not be initiated until Octobe...

In just 3 days the 31st annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections will begin in Berlin. The conference will feature the following symposia organised by SYNTHESYS3: Enabling Infrastructure:  Future Collections, Data & Informatics Key Topics: Data mobilisation – infrastructures aiding the digitisation of collections at scale Data aggregators &<...

OPTIMA – the Organisation for the Phyto-Taxonomic Investigation of the Mediterranean Area – held their triennial general meeting in Montpelier, France from the 6th to the 11th June 2016.

This was attended by Ernst Vitek of NHMW who gave a presentation relating to the upcoming SYNTHESYS Access call.

For information about the meeting see 

A meeting will be held in Crete on the 25th May to discuss the creation of a handbook of best practice and standards for 3D imaging of Natural History specimens (NA2 Task 1.2; JRA Task 2.1).  JRA Task 2.2 – the development of protocols and workflows for the rapid digitisation of collections through Micro-CT – 

The first European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) conference will be taking place from the 19th – 21st May in Berlin. The event will involve three days of talks, interactive sessions and panels to discuss and network with Citizen Science enthusiasts, practitioners, academic researchers, policy makers, science funders, non-governmental organisations, interested citizens and other stakeholder...

A meeting of the Environmental Research Infrastructure (ENVRI) Community will take place in Zandvoort, the Netherlands on Tuesday 10th May 2016. ENVIplus is a Horizon 2020 project bringing together Environmental and Earth System Research Infrastructures, projects and networks together with technical specialist partners to create a more coherent, interdisciplinary and interoperable cluster of En...

Location:  Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together members of the CETAF Digitisation Group and the CETAF Information Science and Technology Commission in order to align activities and to identify new fields of cooperation.

For more information, please see 

A webinar entitled ‘Insights into Inselect:  automating image processing, barcode reading, and validation of user-defined metadata’ will be presented by Lawrence Hudson and Ben Price of the Natural History Museum, London.

Date & time:  29th March, 16:00 BST

Link: 

The public open e-IRG workshop is taking place this week in Amsterdam on the 9th March, entitled “Progress of the e-Infrastructure Commons:  Integration and interoperability – funding and revenue models”

This will be followed on the 10th March by the 

The 2016 GGBN (Global Genome Biodiversity Network) conference will be taking place in Berlin this year, running in parallel with the SPNHC conference, from the 21st to 24th June 2016.

The title of this years’ conference is “Meeting the Challenge:  How to Preserve a Cross-Section of the Tree of Life“.

For more information, please visit