Facilitating access to naturalist collections and related data
Recolnat, the national network of naturalist collections
Recolnat
The French national network of naturalist collections
Récolnat is the national infrastructure that provides access to natural history collections (botany, zoology, palaeontology, geology) to facilitate their use in all areas of scientific research. Managed by the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN), its ambitious aim is to create a collective catalogue of natural history collections in France, by coordinating a network of people with a wide range of skills and expertise. Récolnat has been certified as a research infrastructure (RI) and has been listed as such on the national roadmap of the Ministry of Research since 2016.
A distributed infrastructure in France and overseas
Key figures
10,812,965
724,214
87
Services and tools
Explore the data of the collections, participate in their study and their description.
Collections portal
Discover biodiversity and geodiversity through this catalog of naturalist collections. This portal allows you to freely query, view and export specimen and sample data.
The Herbonauts
Come and contribute to research projects by participating in the transcription and description of naturalist collections. Les Herbonautes is a participatory science program offering Internet users the opportunity to collaborate on thematic missions from home!
Annotate-On
This tool is intended to be your virtual work bench! Annotate-On contains functions to quickly perform morphological and morphometric analyses, as well as any documentation by annotation on images, videos or sounds.
Expertise and training
Through its missions, Récolnat makes it possible to structure the working practices of a community of collection managers across a range of fields, such as description, digitisation and access to naturalist collections.
Historical
Récolnat is the result of a strategic and scientific commitment to structure descriptive data from natural science collections, to make them accessible as part of an open science approach, and to innovate by creating unprecedented digital corpuses.
2013
Launch of the e-Récolnat future investment program
2016
Récolnat included in the infrastructure roadmap of the French Ministry of Research (MESR)
Setting up of a portal giving access to nearly 11 million images and their data from over 80 institutions in France
Development of the participatory science program Les Herbonautes
Availability of tools for researchers working on digital twin of collections, such as the Annotate-On tool
2020
Consolidation of Récolnat as a scientific interest group (GIS)
The aim is to harmonize practices and build a network of scientific excellence by bringing together natural history professionals in France.
Collaboration between museums, universities and research institutions to offer enhanced and privileged access to naturalist collections and their data
Commitment to open data policy and FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable)
Récolnat piloted by the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle
Positioning Récolnat as the French nodal point for the European mirror infrastructure DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections)
News
Network
Articles
Contact
Récolnat 2023