Mission
The National Museum of Natural History of Luxembourg seeks to assemble, manage and analyse observation and collection data on biological diversity and geological diversity and communicate this information to the public. We aim to share a maximum of data with the international scientific community via the GBIF data portal.
We also have a national data portal for Luxembourg where citizens and naturalists can get involved and enter their observations of taxa, look at existing occurrence data (mdata.mnhn.lu), and browse specimens of the Museums’ collections.
Funding
The national node of Luxembourg is funded by the Luxembourg National Museum of Natural History and the Ministry of Culture.
History
The Luxembourg GBIF node is integrated into the National Museum of Natural History of Luxembourg. The Museum has been commissioned to assemble, preserve and study digital, scientific data on the natural heritage and to make this data accessible to the public. The Natural History Information Facility is a dedicated department within the Museum that manages a large database and web data portal on biological occurrence and specimen data of Luxembourg; encourages and assists state agents, citizens, private agencies to contribute their data; and collaborates with international biodiversity data initiatives. In 2001, the Museum’s Natural History Information Facility participated in the European Biological Collection Access Service for Europe project (BioCASE) and became Luxembourg’s national node for biodiversity data. In 2005, the Museum obtained a mandate to sign the GBIF Memorandum of Understanding as the national GBIF node of Luxembourg and in 2018 the Museum became a voting member of GBIF by signing the new MoU.
Structure
The network for biodiversity information in Luxembourg comprises the National Museum of Natural History and its scientific collaborators, agencies (public and private) working in nature conservation as well as citizens. Data contributed to the natural heritage information facility at the Museum, are validated and integrated into the national Recorder database of natural heritage, which is managed and hosted by the Museum. The data of the Recorder database is shared with GBIF via the IPT. The Museum is willing to assist organisations who want to share their data directly via GBIF without importing their data into the national Recorder database.
The node has an informal steering group consisting in the head of the Natural Heritage Information Facility, other scientists and the director of the Natural History Museum.