RSS 1.0Welcome to The Natural History Museum repository
The Natural History Museum is an international leader in the study of the natural world. Our science describes the diversity of nature, promotes an understanding of its past, and supports the anticipation and management of the impact of human activity on the environment.
The Museum's repository provides free access to publications produced by more than 300 scientists working here. Researchers at the Museum study a diverse range of issues, including threats to Earth's biodiversity, the maintenance of delicate ecosystems, environmental pollution and disease. The accessible repository showcases this broad research output.
The repository was launched in 2016 with an initially modest number of journal publications in its database. It now includes book chapters and blogs from Museum scientists.
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Boosting biodiversity in school grounds: a theory of changeThe National Education Nature Park aims to involve every nursery, school, and college in England in enhancing the biodiversity on their site, whilst supporting young people’s wellbeing, pro-environmental behaviours, and green skills. Young people gather environmental data using citizen science research, and then through collaboration and collective decision-making, they design and implement their own nature recovery actions. But will this participation in community and citizen science lead to behaviour change and environmental action, and how can we build participants’ sense of agency to take environmental action through our programme? Here, we present our Theory of Change for the Nature Park and the design features of the programme that connect participation in citizen science with achieving two crucial types of change - environmental change in the form of biodiversity gain, and the behaviour change that underpins it.
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Effects of land use and soil properties on taxon richness and abundance of soil assemblagesAbstract: Land‐use change and habitat degradation are among the biggest drivers of aboveground biodiversity worldwide but their effects on soil biodiversity are less well known, despite the importance of soil organisms in developing soil structure, nutrient cycling and water drainage. Combining a global compilation of biodiversity data from soil assemblages collated as part of the PREDICTS project with global data on soil characteristics, we modelled how taxon richness and total abundance of soil organisms have responded to land use. We also estimated the global Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII)—the average abundance and compositional similarity of taxa that remain in an area, compared to a minimally impacted baseline, for soil biodiversity. This is the first time the BII has been calculated for soil biodiversity. Relative to undisturbed vegetation, soil organism total abundance and taxon richness were reduced in all land uses except pasture. Soil properties mediated the response of soil biota, but not in a consistent way across land uses. The global soil BII in cropland is, on average, a third of that originally present. However, in grazed sites the decline is less severe. The BII of secondary vegetation depends on age, with sites with younger growth showing a lower BII than mature vegetation. We conclude that land‐use change has reduced local soil biodiversity worldwide, and this further supports the proposition that soil biota should be considered explicitly when using global models to estimate the state of biodiversity.
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The genome sequence of the false flower beetle, Anaspis frontalis (Linnaeus, 1758)We present a genome assembly from a specimen of <ns5:italic>Anaspis frontalis</ns5:italic> (the false flower beetle; Arthropoda; Insecta; Coleoptera; Scraptiidae). The assembly contains two haplotypes with total lengths of 808.55 megabases and 802.05 megabases. Most of haplotype 1 (95.81%) is scaffolded into 8 chromosomal pseudomolecules, including the X chromosome, while haplotype 2 is a scaffold-level assembly. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled and is 16.47 kilobases in length.
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The genome sequence of the click beetle, Ampedus sanguinolentus sanguinolentus (Schrank, 1776)We present a genome assembly from a female specimen of <ns3:italic>Ampedus sanguinolentus sanguinolentus</ns3:italic> (click beetle; Arthropoda; Insecta; Coleoptera; Elateridae). The assembly contains two haplotypes with total lengths of 1,574.76 megabases and 1,572.87 megabases. Most of haplotype 1 (97.13%) is scaffolded into 10 chromosomal pseudomolecules, while haplotype 2 is a scaffold-level assembly. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled and is 15.99 kilobases in length.
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The genome sequence of a longhorn beetle, Rhagium mordax (Degeer, 1775)We present a genome assembly from an individual female specimen of <ns5:italic>Rhagium mordax</ns5:italic> (longhorn beetle; Arthropoda; Insecta; Coleoptera; Cerambycidae). The genome sequence has a total length of 775.60 megabases. Most of the assembly (99.53%) is scaffolded into 10 chromosomal pseudomolecules. The mitochondrial genome has also been assembled and is 16.68 kilobases in length. Gene annotation of this assembly on Ensembl identified 11,937 protein-coding genes.