The UK’s natural science collections—millions of preserved plants, animals, rocks, and fossils—are mostly locked away in physical cabinets, accessible only to researchers who can travel to them. DiSSCo UK is building a national digital network to connect these collections, making them searchable and usable online by anyone, anywhere. This matters because the vast majority of these specimens are currently invisible to science. Without digital access, researchers cannot easily compare specimens across institutions, track biodiversity changes, or use the data to address urgent questions about climate shifts, invasive species, or ecosystem health. The collections hold irreplaceable records of the natural world, but their value is severely limited when only a fraction is available for large-scale analysis. If DiSSCo UK succeeds, it will transform how scientists, policymakers, and the public interact with the UK’s natural heritage. Instead of relying on physical visits, researchers could query millions of specimens in seconds, enabling faster discoveries in conservation, agriculture, and disease tracking. The infrastructure would also support industries that depend on accurate species identification, such as biosecurity and pharmaceuticals. For the public, it could mean richer access to the nation’s biological and geological history through a single digital portal.
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The Distributed System of Scientific Collections UK is a national infrastructure to revolutionise how we manage, share and use the UK's natural science collections, creating a distributed network that provides a step change in research infrastructure for the UK. While the physical integration of such a collection would be almost inconceivable, its digital integration is within reach. Building on the UK Natural History Museum's (NHM) digitisation programme and in partnership with more than 90 collection-holding institutions across the length and breadth of the UK, DiSSCo UK seeks to unlock the full scientific, economic and social benefits of the UK's natural science collections, which are presently constrained by the limits of physical access. With just 8% of the UK's 140 million specimens currently available digitally, their role in the emerging biodiversity data revolution is diminished. Through nationally coordinated action, DiSSCo UK seeks to massively accelerate the digitisation of these collections and the impact of these data. Since 2021, AHRC's iDAH programme has been supporting this community to coordinate their activities in the development of a national programme of digitisation to unlock the full potential of these collections. In particular, iDAH has facilitated construction and maintenance of the collections access repository www.dissco-uk.org, and the data pipelines feeding this repository. Having successfully submitted an outline proposal to UKRI's infrastructure fund for £155.6m investment, DiSSCo UK Transition is intended to help bridge the gap to support the programme of work until late 2026, while the Outline and Full Business Cases are developed and go through UK government approvals processes. In this proposal, we mark the end of the preparatory phase of DiSSCo UK and enter the transition phase with a series of tasks that continue to develop and iterate the data repository and lead the DiSSCo UK national network of partners towards operational readiness. DiSSCo Transition is intended to run until the formal start of DiSSCo UK as an infrastructure, expected between April to September 2026, subject to approval of a finalised timeline.
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