Field Museum joins effort to combat climate change by studying the millions of objects in history museums around the world

Levels below Sue the T. rex and natural history exhibits of all kinds, jars of preserved frogs and salamanders line the shelves of the Field Museum’s collections.

As climate change and the loss of biodiversity accelerate, studying historical specimens may provide answers to some of the planet’s most pressing habitat problems.

“Amphibians, in particular, are a real sort of canaries in the coal mine,” said Field Museum President and CEO Julian Siggers. Studying frogs, newts and salamanders, which cannot regulate their own body temperature, can show the impacts of climate change.

“There’s some pretty profound questions that we can answer, and many of them and other ones that we’re the most concerned about,” Siggers said.

Collecting specimens today and comparing them with those collected in the past can give insight into how species have been distributed across the planet and survived previous changes in climate, and it can show biodiversity changes.

A global study authored by natural history museum leaders surveyed 73 natural history museum collections across Europe and North America, including Chicago’s Field Museum. The study, published last month in the journal Science, concluded these collections, totaling 1.1 billion objects, can be sources of information for climate change, pandemic preparedness, food security, invasive species, rare minerals and biodiversity.

“In the year 2100, scientists and policy-makers will look back to the collections made in the 21st century to inform their decisions about the 22nd century,” the study says.

The paper was released three days after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report that found the planet is unlikely to be on track to meet its most ambitious climate target — limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial temperatures — by the early 2030s.

According to the latest IPCC report, human-caused climate change, some due to fossil fuel use, is affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has damaged ecosystems for plants, wildlife and people.

Larry Coble is the board president of 350 Chicago, a local chapter of a national group that advocates for action to reduce the impacts of climate change. He said he hopes the federal government takes the IPCC report seriously. Coble, whose group is currently working on a campaign to encourage the state of Illinois to ban new investment in fossil fuel companies, worries about what kind of planet his son and other members of Generation Z will have.

“For him now, and the generations to follow, they all deserve a chance at a decent human life,” he said. “They don’t deserve what we leave them, which is a planet that is going to be terribly challenged.”

The study by natural history museum leaders is a first step in a call for a global collection that would be able to offer some insight into how to navigate climate change.

Though generally unavailable to the public for research, historical materials in collections around the world are accessible to scientists. Previously, no one had made an effort to catalog all of this information.

“It was absolutely fascinating because it showed us not just what we have, but what we don’t have,” said Siggers, one of the study authors.

The participating museum collections lack specimens from polar and marine regions, arthropods (insects, spiders and crustaceans) and microorganisms, he said.

The IPCC report says that “some tropical, coastal, polar and mountain ecosystems have reached hard adaptation limits,” meaning these ecosystems are vulnerable to environmental risks such as increasing temperatures and extreme weather. Filling collections gaps would improve climate research in these areas.

In recent years, museums have begun digitizing their collections, which has increased cooperation among museums worldwide.

“Science is all about collaboration; you can’t do everything all by yourself,” said Ranchunliu Kamei, the collections manager of the reptiles and amphibians division at the Field Museum. Digitization has improved efficiency, but museums are far from documenting the entire planet’s biodiversity, she said.

Digitization has also made museum collections more accessible to the public. The Field Museum has a database where anyone can search the scientific name of a species. While the database currently includes entries on when a species was collected and whether the museum has a DNA sample, Kamei said they’re working to include more data, including photographs of the live species and audio recordings.

“We’re trying to have all of that metadata associated with the physical specimen and make it more visible, widely available to policymakers, media people, scientists or school kids,” she said.