Early 2025, the WoRMS Data Management Team (DMT) was contacted by the chief taxonomic editor of Kinorhyncha, Birger Neuhaus. Dr. Neuhaus informed us on his upcoming retirement from the Museum für Naturkunde (Berlin, Germany). Next to bringing on board a new taxonomic expert for this beloved Kinorhyncha, he also expressed his desire to safeguard his life-long gathered collection of literature about the conservation of specimens, including conservation issues, such as the ageing of microscope slides, digitization, wet collections and related scientific fields with connections to taxonomy and specimen collections in general. The collection includes literature dating back to the 16th century, as well as on the origin of natural polymers used for varnishes or in medicine.

WoRMS took on the challenge to ingest over 1,500 literature references related to this topic, gathered now under a sub-collection of “conservation of Natural History Collections”. Most of these references either have their pdf attached or contain a DOI or a link to an external source where the publication is available. Although this is a topic that touches all taxonomy, it was specifically decided to store this collection under the Kinorhyncha portal, in honor of the original driving force behind it.

Although Dr. Neuhaus will be retiring from his museum position, he has no intention yet to step back from WoRMS and his Kinorhyncha. We’re looking forward to continuing the collaboration, and seeing this important literature collection growing in the future.

The work of the Data Management Team (DMT) to carry out this literature rescue action is supported by LifeWatch Belgium, part of the E-Science European LifeWatch Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research. LifeWatch is a distributed virtual laboratory, used for different aspects of biodiversity research. The Species Information Backbone of LifeWatch aims at bringing together taxonomic and species-related data and at filling the gaps in our knowledge.


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