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 cultural value of Natural History Museums.