Sir

The Briefing about natural history museums was very informative but the editorial, “101 uses for a dead bird”, promotes a number of misconceptions(Nature 394, 105; 1998& Nature 394, 115; 119; 1998).

Museum collections are, as you recognize, the ultimate basis of most if not all biodiversity studies, including those that permit the decline in biodiversity to be monitored and controlled. Principal input is through the discipline of systematics, that is, the recognition of species, their variation and their relationships. Systematics condenses the vast amounts of disparate information in large numbers of specimens from many localities and puts it in comprehensible and usable form. Museums also act as repositories for other data including those on species distribution.

Systematics and related data collection have been pursued with increasing pace in natural history museums since their foundation, often in the nineteenth or even eighteenth centuries. Strong internal cultures within museums have helped ensure continued systematic output, even in conditions of considerable adversity. Any implication that museums and similar institutions have not previously been conducting what are essentially biodiversity studies is wrong; they are the very places where such investigations have been predominantly carried out.

You also state that museums have been parochial and “can no longer afford to work in isolation”. In the vast majority of cases, they never were and never did. There has been extensive global cooperation between large museums for nearly 200 years. For example, George Boulenger, the lone curator of lower vertebrates at the Natural History Museum in London, exchanged information in ten years around the turn of the century with some 700 correspondents, many in museums in other countries, including 20 in Italy alone. Such large-scale interaction is far more extensive today. Not only information but study specimens constantly pass between museums around the world and have done so for many years. In the Natural History Museum, many hundreds of loans involving tens of thousands of specimens are dispatched annually.

There is already a great deal of cooperation between relatively rich and poor nations, including the case you mention of Mexico's National Commission of Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity, which sent scientists to museums worldwide to assemble data on Mexican specimens. The commission is to be congratulated on producing cheaply a biodiversity management system by making use of these data, but it must be remembered that the information was readily available because museums cooperated willingly and actively in the project. More importantly, they had previously put a far greater amount of effort and expense into accumulating and curating the material, painstakingly identifying it and subjecting it to further systematic analysis, resulting in the description of many new species, and making the data easily accessible. After all this, putting the information into a database as the Mexicans did was comparatively easy.