Study: Harnessing natural history collections for collaborative pandemic preparedness (DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biaf035)
Across the world, natural history museums hold about 3 billion specimens of plants and animals in collections-and these collections may also contain information needed to prevent, prepare for, and respond to potential future pandemics.
But the collections are an underused resource in developing strategies to predict or respond to disease outbreaks that could turn into a pandemic, according to a group of collections scientists and other experts, co-led by Cody Thompson, mammal collection manager and associate research scientist at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
In 2024, the scientists gathered to analyze how to tap natural history collections and bring together research from across disciplines to help the world prepare for a potential future pandemic-something researchers say is likely because of climate change and human encroachment on wildlife habitat. Their findings were recently published in the journal BioScience.
"Museum collections are basically a time capsule. For example, our collections at the University of Michigan go back a couple hundred years. In places like Europe, collections go back much longer than that," Thompson said. "Because of how we've developed natural history collections, preserved specimens and saved information over time, museums offer a great resource for being able to better predict potential zoonotic pathogen (outbreaks) that might occur and how they might occur. And that's all the way through current, modern collecting."
Lessons from past pandemics
The work, funded by a National Science Foundation grant, came out of two workshops in which collections experts and researchers discussed lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and past pandemics and developed ideas about how collections can be incorporated more effectively into future pandemic responses. Fellow U-M co-authors include Nicte Ordonez-Garza, the collection manager for the U-M Museum of Zoology's biorepository, and Oliver Keller, collection specialist for the biorepository.
Participants included experts in museum collections, One Health (an integrated approach to address environmental, human and animal health), pathobiology, bioinformatics, education and computer science. The meetings included professional facilitators who are also artists and who created graphic illustrations of the discussions in real time, helping to convey the topics in a visual format to stimulate further conversations.
"During the recent pandemic that we experienced, people were learning a lot," said Deborah Paul, lead author of the study and a biodiversity informatics specialist and community liaison at the Prairie Research Institute. "We know collections can help us understand what's happening in nature-with us, with humans as part of nature. So, the goal of this project was to gather people who have expertise in this type of research and were part of studying what was going on."
Collections of knowledge
Worldwide, natural history collections-like the U-M Museum of Zoology and Herbarium-are home to around "3 billion specimens that document life on Earth," the researchers wrote. "These samples hold information that can be used in pandemic preparedness, offering clues about the geographic distributions of pathogens and their hosts, the origins and spread of disease, and the ecological conditions leading to spillover."
The authors say there is a need for interdisciplinary communication and network development, raising awareness of natural history data across disciplines, and for financial support of workforce development, collections infrastructure, field work and digitization. Data needs to be cross-domain searchable, accessible, interoperable and reusable to be impactful.
"We have more and more collections data all the time, so there is a need to interconnect it and make it discoverable to disease biologists, to virologists, to wildlife biologists that we have right here at INHS. We need to be making these data connected to the public health sector," Paul said. "That means investing in local infrastructure, it means investing in local data stewardship, it means investing in local expertise."
Additionally, interdisciplinary collaboration goes beyond sharing data. For example, samples taken by field researchers need to be stored by collections managers using methods that preserve the information, such as RNA, needed by pathobiologists, who use these materials to study and track disease-causing pathogens.
One world, one health
The researchers considered pandemic preparedness and the role of collections in the context of One Health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that human health is connected to the health of animals, plants and the environment, and interactions between them.
Changes in global populations and where they live, changes in climate and land use, and increased global transportation have affected the spread of diseases between people and animals-and increased the need to not consider human health and disease alone.
Paul said using a One Health approach allows for early detection of a disease outbreak, rapid notification of communities globally, and faster response to threats. This saves lives and shields the global economy from serious impacts. Because geopolitical boundaries do not contain pathogens, it's in the interest of all countries to collectively invest in the infrastructure and networks needed to prepare for and address any potential pandemic, she added.
"One of our main findings is that we needed to do a better job of having the information we collect on a regular basis available to those that are doing active, on-the-ground public health monitoring for disease not just here in the U.S., but across the world," Thompson said.
