The Natural History Museum has launched new gardens as part of its Urban Nature Project in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to monitor urban nature changes. The museum aims for its five-acre site to be one of the most studied urban nature sites globally, with AWS providing the technology for data collection and sharing.
The project includes a new Data Ecosystem cloud platform, scientific sensors, and various research streams like visual wildlife observations and extracting DNA from soil samples. The NHM is utilizing AWS Glue for data integration and storage, alongside Amazon DocumentDB and Amazon S3 for data management.
The museum’s long-standing wildlife monitoring data will also be imported into the new system alongside new data to generate insights and solutions for managing urban nature. The partnership with AWS aims to combine data types for a holistic understanding of urban biodiversity and facilitate easy data sharing and interpretation for various stakeholders.
The NHM is using AWS SageMaker for machine learning to enable data interpretation and plans to generate a significant amount of data, particularly from audio recordings. While the system is currently limited to internal researchers, the museum aims to share data with the wider biodiversity sector in the future.
Overall, the project hopes to inspire more people to connect with nature and contribute to safeguarding urban wildlife in the UK, addressing the country’s nature depletion challenges through data-driven solutions.