Biodiversity and Conservation

Biodiversity is the term we use to describe the variety of life in a particular area — how many different types of living things there are.

Many of our researchers are interested in biodiversity, both now and in the past. The grand vision of a natural history museum back when many started (about 100 years ago) was to document our planet’s biodiversity — to gather a sample from all the species we know of and keep them safely stored for future generations to study. We still do that today, documenting new species and observing how biodiversity changes over time.

And it’s not just about species alive today; our researchers study how biodiversity has changed over millions of years.