Millions of irreplaceable biodiversity specimens have been re-homed at a new CSIRO facility that the agency says will support research to better understand and manage Australia’s natural environment.
Named ‘Diversity’, the $90 million National Research Collections building in Canberra features temperature-controlled vaults that are bushfire and pest-resistant while designed to preserve 13 million specimens for future generations.
Among the specimens, which have been collected over 150 years, are 55,000 birds, 17,000 orchids, 2.4 million moths and seven million beetles.
Dr Clare Holleley, who is the director of vertebrate collections, says the facility serves as a “time machine for Australia’s biodiversity”.
“What this building captures is the full diversity of Australian fauna and flora,”she said.
“It’s taken snapshots of specimens over time, and when we put all of those little snapshots together, it puts together a picture of how Australia’s biodiversity is changing.
“We can learn from those trends and potentially predict what is going to happen in the future.”
The collections include 99 per cent of Australia’s native birds, as well as exotic bird species, skeletons, mammals, reptiles stored in ethanol, eggs and frozen tissue.
Relocating the specimens took about a year.
The official opening of the facility coincides with National Science Week, described by CSIRO chief executive Doug Hilton as an “exciting” moment.
“It’s a little bit like a gallery or a museum that holds our national heritage … it’s a library of our biodiversity,” he said.
Dr Hilton described the facility as “cutting-edge”, featuring new genomics laboratories and digitisation facilities that will allow scientists to extract and share more information from research specimens.
“If we can’t understand how things are changing over time, it’s very hard to conserve things for the future,” he said.
“What we have here is a facility that holds specimens in a highly secure way and allows us to digitise and automate digitisation in a way that is just the envy of the world.”
While there was celebration at the opening of the building, concern remains about the potential of job cuts at the agency, with the Community and Public Sector Union warning that hundreds of jobs could be axed this year.
In responding to those concerns, Dr Hilton said: “Our science has to adapt”.
“We have to be able to shape our workforce and choose the programs of research that we think will give the best impact to the Australian community for the problems that face us today and over the next 10 years,” he said.
“There are programs of research that we may have to stop in order for us to be able to do new programs of research to tackle those big problems like productivity, sustainability and our sovereign science capacity.”
He said the agency would be reviewing its whole portfolio of science next month and then would need to make “hard choices”, but wouldn’t say how many jobs could be affected.
“We need to be thinking about the programs of research that we do. We have to be refining those to make sure we are working on the big problems. I think the Australian community would expect us to do that,” he said.
The new National Research Collections building was jointly funded by the CSIRO and the Department of Education through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.
While the building won’t be open to the public, the collections will be accessible to researchers, governments, and citizen scientists worldwide.