Natural history museums are privileged spaces for seminal research on different subjects of biological sciences such as biodiversity, evolution, ecology, biogeography and taxonomy. This crucial role is due to the fact that they represent biological diversity repositories becoming huge libraries of information on Earth living organisms. The long-term sampling through various decades renders tonatural history collections an historic perspective that allows reconstructing a “memory”, sometimes secular, of natural patterns and processes. This aspect gains particular relevance nowadays because of the increasing rate of species extinctions and biodiversity decrease.

This course aims:

• To evidence the importance of natural history collections for the study of biodiversity;
• To show new tools and approaches to extract and disseminate biodiversity data from natural history collections;
• To increase awareness of young researchers for the scientific and culture value of Natural History Museums.

This course has a recognition of 6 ECTs for FCUL PhD students enrolling in it as part of their first doctoral year. For FCUL PhD students only requiring 5 ECTs in their specific PhD programmes, the last 6 hours of the course are not mandatory and the certificate will be on 'Topics in Natural History Collections and Biodiversity’.

Lecturer(s) or Responsable(s): Maria Judite Alves (coordinator, MUHNAC/ cE3c), Raquel Barata (MUHNAC), Cristiane Bastos-Silveira (MUHNAC), Alexandra Cartaxana (MUHNAC), Teresa Catry (MUHNAC/CESAM), Luís Ceríaco (MUHNAC), Ana Isabel Correia (MUHNAC/ cE3c), César Garcia (MUHNAC/cE3c), José Pedro Granadeiro (FCUL/CESAM), Luís Filipe Lopes (MUHNAC/ cE3c), Paulo Marques (MUHNAC/ISPA), Gabriel Martins (IGC), Cecília Sérgio (MUHNAC/ cE3c), Manuela Sim-Sim (MUHNAC/ cE3c).
Date: May 29th, 2017 to June 2nd, 2017
Deadline for Applications: May 5th, 2017