Missouri Botanical Garden

The Missouri Botanical Garden will develop methods and software to mobilize the vast stores of collections data contained in museums to predict and mitigate threats. Natural history museums and herbaria collectively hold hundreds of millions of zoological, botanical, and paleontological specimens. These collections serve as the foundation for understanding the distribution of life on Earth and the basis for addressing climate change, loss of biodiversity, emerging diseases, and other pressing global problems. This project will help museums respond effectively to these problems by identifying gaps in coverage of museum collections. The project team will develop methods to model the distributions of species using museum and herbarium data; create free, intuitive, open-source software that enables use of these methods; and disseminate the techniques and software through online video tutorials, webinars, and user manuals, and through publications.