Illustration: 1kilo

Whether they hold gold nuggets or a coelacanth from Graubünden, or flowers from the Zurich Oberland: natural history collections are an indispensable source of knowledge about the history of the Earth. They tell us about the dissemination of species, the emergence of biodiversity, and the impact of humans on the environment.

The Swiss natural history collections hold well over 60 million specimens of animals, plants, fungi, stones, bones, fossils and soil samples. Some of these objects are over a hundred million years old. But the objects that are accessible to the public form only the tip of a huge iceberg. The biggest part of these collections is stored away out of sight – in the back rooms of museums, botanical gardens and universities. And yet these Swiss collections are of global significance – not just because Switzerland is home to many reference specimens, but also because these collections date back a long time and never suffered from the effects of wars.

“As environmental problems increase, the collections become ever more important”, says Pia Stieger, a biologist at the Swiss Academy of Sciences (SCNAT). She heads a group of researchers who are currently writing a baseline report on Switzerland’s natural history collections. “Often, it’s only such collections that enable us to document environmental changes over several decades, and thereby deduce scenarios for the future”.

New technologies for new research

It was only thanks to eggshells in natural history collections that we were able to determine the impact of pesticides on the environment. Indeed, with every technological innovation new analyses are made possible. Researchers can analyse the DNA and the chemical composition of objects, while new scanning technologies allow us to peer inside rocks and plants.

Already today, these collections play an important role in investigating climate, biodiversity, pest control and the subsoil and bedrock. But much of the potential of these collections remains unrealised. The problem is that only some 17 percent of the objects have been captured digitally. Most museums lack the trained personnel necessary to take proper care of the objects and attend to their classification and digitisation. “In some institutions you can find boxes full of unsorted objects. They just don’t have the resources or the expert personnel who could classify and label them properly”, says Pia Stieger. “We need a boost in investment in order to turn these collections into a truly efficient research infrastructure”. The European Union is already one step further: it has placed natural history collections on the priority list for research infrastructure.

The type cases of natural history

For the first-ever time, we now have solid statistics for the Swiss natural history collections. They are bigger than hitherto believed, and contain a particularly large number of reference specimens – artefacts that have resulted in the initial descriptions of new species or rocks. We here take a look at research projects that would have been impossible without these collections.

Illustration: 1kilo

No shrimp too small

Freshwater shrimps are important in aquatic ecosystems. They dispose of fallen leaves and are excellent food for fish. But for a long time, little was known about how widespread they were. Four years ago, the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment and the Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) began a study of the distribution of freshwater shrimps in Switzerland. They have analysed samples from over 2,500 different bodies of water and investigated samples that were conserved in several museums. Once the project is completed, the results will be stored in the Cantonal Zoological Museum in Lausanne. This means that future researchers will be able to track how populations of these organisms have changed in different bodies of water.

Sour fruit

The spotted-wing drosophila, or vinegar fly, makes life difficult for farmers. It comes from south-east Asia, infests ripe fruit, and has been spreading across Switzerland for some seven years now. Because this species reproduces quickly, it can destroy entire harvests. Researchers from Agroscope have recently discovered a new parasitic wasp in Switzerland, and identified it by reference to the collections in the Bern Natural History Museum. This species, Vrestovia fidenas, is a natural enemy of the vinegar fly, and could play a role in controlling it.

Botany and mycology

Dried wild plants, crops, seeds, fruit and mushrooms: botanical collections document shifts in nature and cultivated land.

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The biography of the potato

There’s been much debate about the origins of the potatoes cultivated in Europe today. Do they come from the Andean highlands, or the Chilean lowlands? In order to solve this question, researchers have analysed over 50 leaf samples from 11 European herbaria that were preserved between 1720 and 1910, including samples from Basel, Geneva and Zurich. The results show that the first potato varieties introduced to Europe came from the Andes. By the time blight caused the Irish Potato Famine in the late 1840s, however, agriculture both there and on the European continent was already dominated by potato varieties from the Chilean lowlands.

Species decline in Zurich

How has the flora of the canton of Zurich changed over the past hundred years? To answer this question, the Zurich Botanical Society set up a citizen science project. Since then, 150 volunteers have observed over 100,000 plants in new locations and digitised 35,000 samples from the collections of Zurich University and ETH Zurich. The analysis of this data has not yet been completed. But it is already clear that the flora has changed drastically. Since 1900, some five percent of ferns and flowering plants have disappeared, and five percent are new species. The distribution of roughly every second species has declined sharply during the period in question.

Palaeontology

Mammoths and dinosaurs are the big hits in museums. But palaeontological collections also hold many other zoological and botanical objects from times long past.

Illustration: 1kilo

Exotic find in the Alps

Palaeontologists have discovered a new species of coelacanth in the canton of Graubünden (Foreyia maxkuhni). This was a bony fish that already populated the seas some 400 million years ago. The specimen in question is remarkable for its head, which is in the form of a dome, and also for its short body and its very small mouth. This fish presumably did not live in deep waters, as is the case with its relative that still exists today, but swam close to the coast. This fossil is 240 million years old, and has been analysed by means of computer tomography. It’s a spectacular find, because the previous theory – that coelacanths have barely changed for millions of years – is now disproven.

Changing mammals

Lake sediments in southern Switzerland contain coniferous timbers from several thousands of years ago. Researchers from the University of Lausanne have now analysed their genetic material. The data shows how the spread of the very first agrarian societies influenced silver firs. Now researchers from the Natural History Museum of Geneva want to use the same methods to analyse bones of mammals such as reindeer and steppe bison. These genetic analyses should show how changes in the environment impacted on large mammals.

Geology

Crystals, stones, meteorites, soil samples: geological collections can let us experience the history of the Earth and other planets.

Illustration: 1kilo

Traces of life in stones from Mars?

In the summer of 2020, the Mars probe ExoMars will transport a close-up imager (CLUPI) to our neighbouring planet. Twenty years ago, researchers discovered traces of microbes in their rock collections that had lived deep in the rock under extreme conditions on Earth. A team from the Space Exploration Institute in Neuchâtel has now developed a camera that will be able to take high-resolution images of outcrops, rocks, soils and drill core samples on Mars. This should make it possible to determine whether or not there used to be life there.

Will the tunnel roof hold?

More than 30 people died in the fire in the Mont-Blanc Tunnel in 1999. The temperature during the blaze rose to over 1,000 degrees Celsius. For this reason, there was much uncertainty just after the disaster about whether or not the tunnel roof would hold. Before the salvage and clean-up operation could begin, the precise condition of the rock had to be determined in the sections where the fire had taken place. To this end, experts consulted some 500 rock samples in the Museum for Geology in Lausanne that had been taken during the construction of the Tunnel. The Museum has a unique collection of almost 15,000 rock samples from the Mont Blanc massif.

“We ought to digitise half of all our objects”

Reto Nyffeler | Illustration: 1kilo

Reto Nyffeler runs the second largest herbarium in Switzerland at the University of Zurich. He believes that Switzerland’s federal structures are hindering the processing and digitisation of collections.

Reto Nyffeler, you’re responsible for a collection of three million objects. How do you keep track of them?

By keeping them in meticulous order. The objects are ordered alphabetically according to their classification, like in a card index – in other words, according to their family, genus and species. What’s lacking is a digital register of the objects in the collection that would grant us a whole new means of accessing them. We’re working on that.

What do these natural history collections provide to researchers today?

A collection is like a library. Instead of paper, we have preserved organisms with details of where they were found and when. Natural history collections across the world hold three billion preserved organisms. That’s a huge sample of the living world. New research questions are always arising in science, and they can be answered with the aid of this library of specimens. It’s getting more and more difficult to get permission to collect samples in nature, so demand is growing for materials from these collections.

In total, Swiss collections hold more than 60 million objects. Wouldn’t it be easier if the number were smaller?

[laughs] Yes, but how would we go about choosing what to keep? These objects were all collected at some point for specific reasons. Throughout history there’ve always been different opinions as to which objects are really important, and which ones aren’t. It’s difficult to decide today which objects will be significant to science in future.

How do you go about digitising your collection?

Each year, we record some 100,000 objects. Every object is photographed with a high-resolution camera and is given a barcode. Then the data record is stored in a database, thanks to the help of volunteers from the Botanical Society. In total, we’ve created digital records for nearly ten percent of the collection.

“In France, the government spent large sums of money on digitising collections over a period of a few years”.

Can these objects be eliminated from the collection after their records have been digitised? After all, the information about them is then stored in the database.

Sometimes we still need to fall back on the preserved object itself. New technologies enable us to acquire new information. And some of the information exists only in the actual object, such as DNA and chemical constituents.

Across Switzerland as a whole, only 17 percent of objects in collections are accessible electronically. Why is Switzerland lagging behind with the digitisation process?

The different institutes aren’t interlinked that much. In France, the government spent large sums of money digitising collections over several years. Switzerland’s regional structures mean things proceed somewhat slower. On the other hand, we have more time to prepare our projects thoroughly and to learn from our mistakes.

How important is digitisation?

The objects will only be accessible to current research once digitisation has progressed considerably further. If scientists are going to be able to carry out new analyses based on large sample numbers, at least half to two-thirds of the objects must be recorded digitally along with their geographic coordinates. I can give you one example of such a research question: how has the composition of flora changed over the course of the past decades, and what impact could this change have on the decline in insect diversity that we have already observed?