SYNTHESYS - Synthesis of Systematic Resources

From now on, Europe’s globally important natural history collections and resources, including the ones of the MIZ PAS, are available to scientists across Europe. SYNTHESYS is a FPVI European-funded Integrated Infrastructure Initiative formed by a consortium of Europe’s most prestigious natural history institutions, including museums and botanical gardens. SYNTHESYS is coordinated by the Natural History Museum in London and is meant to last 5 years.

SYNTHESYS comprises two parts: Access and Network Activities, which together aim to create the so-called ‘Virtual Museum’ - a unique source of zoological, botanical, geological and palaeontological collections (in total, the collections comprise more than 337 million specimens). Access enables researchers based in Europe to work with the earth and life science collections, facilities and taxonomic expertise at the 20 institutions in 11 national Taxonomic Facility Consortia (TAFs). Networking Activities are focused on creating a single virtual museum by:  

• bringing together information on the strengths of each institution’s collections and expertise;
• setting standards and improving the long-term preservation and access to the collections;
• creating an integrated, distributed European collection database system;
• establishing common policies and methodologies (such as tissue samples for molecular study);
• assessing techniques from other disciplines in terms of possibility of applying them in systematics and other natural history studies.

This website's role is to describe the strengths of the Museum and Institute of Zoology and to explain how to apply in order to visit us and work with our collections and other resources.

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Synthesys partners

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