London’s Natural History Museum has opened its revamped urban garden to the public. The 2-hectare (5 acre) site hosts 25 sensors gathering environmental DNA and acoustic data to help monitor, understand and protect urban nature. These sensors will gather data such as bird calls, traffic noise and underwater recordings from a pond. This information will be collected, refined and disseminated within the museum’s new cloud-based platform, Data Ecosystem. Once fully operational, the sensor network will be capable of gathering up to 20 terabytes of acoustic data in its first year. This will give the museum’s team of more than 350 research scientists unprecedented access to a wealth of biodiversity and environmental data. With the help of machine learning, it will aid in the recovery of UK urban wildlife. As well as gathering information from the garden, the Data Ecosystem will handle and make accessible data from the museum’s community science initiatives, such as the Nature Overheard programme, in which people across the UK record local sounds to boost understanding of how road noise affects insect populations. This audio can now be centralised to give scientists even deeper insights into local and national biodiversity. The sensors and continued data collection will make the museum’s gardens one of the most intensively studied urban sites of its kind.
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