1. The Natural History Museum of Crete – University of Crete is, since 2014, an elected regular member of CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities), a European Network of Scientific Institutions that promotes education, research and understanding of biology and the related sciences.
2. The Natural History Museum of Crete – University of Crete (NHMC – UoC), is the national representative in the European Research Infrastructure (RI) of ESFRI, the DiSSCo consortium. The consortium is in the last part of the preparatory phase with the aim of becoming a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) legal form. Goal, the future development of digital services for researchers, businesses and the public. The DiSSCo consortium involves 136 institutions with natural history collections from 21 countries, with > 5000 researchers. Each of the 21 countries is represented by the respective national representative, for Greece in this case the NHMC – UoC.
3. The Museum of Natural History of Crete (NHMC – UoC) of the University of Crete and the Hellenic Center for Marine Research (HCMR) join forces to create unified biological collections and digitally record biodiversity, with the aim of preserving it and protecting the natural environment .
The Greek Natural History Collections (NHC), in addition to being a valuable cultural heritage, are an invaluable national infrastructure for the study and assessment of biodiversity, and its correlation with environmental changes over the years. They are also a key resource for the country to meet its obligations arising from international agreements, such as the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol.
In this context, the partnership between NHMC – UoC and HCMR is an excellent prospect, which will allow the physical and electronic recording of biodiversity, both of the terrestrial and marine environment, thus allowing a more complete approach and study of it. HCMR, starting today, will enrich the collections of the NHMC – UoC, providing samples of various plant and animal species, from all the aquatic and marine ecosystems it studies. The NHMC – UoC will take care of their arrangement in the status of museum collections, making them easily accessible to the research community worldwide.
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