Words by Smiley Team
As part of a brand new public engagement initiative around the environmental impacts of Covid-19, the Natural History Museum is collaborating with data visualisation company Beyond Words to illustrate how the movement of people has altered during lockdown.
The Museum, based in West London, is a world-leading science research centre and the most-visited natural history museum in Europe. It hopes that it will be able to use its unique position in the project which will engage people with the dramatic societal changes that have taken place since lockdown measures were announced on 23 March.
The Museum is already the custodian of one of the world’s most important scientific collections comprising over 80 million specimens. The scale of this collection enables researchers from all over the world to document how species have and continue to respond to environmental changes - which is vital in helping predict what might happen in the future and informing future policies and plans to help the planet.
This project, having received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council, will - through compelling infographics, articles, videos and social media - crowdsource perspectives from the public to discover which three environmental impacts of the lockdown they are most interested in. The research will culminate in a live interactive online event in which audiences can pose questions to young and emerging researchers about those topics.
“From goats colonising deserted streets in Wales to cleaner air and clear skies in London, the Covid-19 pandemic has presented an unprecedented view of our world with minimal human presence” says Clare Matterson, The Natural History Museum’s Executive Director of Public Engagement. “We want to use this new appreciation of the human impact on the natural world to enhance understanding of our role in the interconnectedness of nature and excite people about the possibilities of environmental science.
“It is also an incredibly valuable listening exercise - an exciting opportunity to find out which environmental impacts the public care most about to help shape not only future exhibitions, and events but also scientific research projects.”
A number of the Museum’s departments will be involved such as the digital team, whose output reached a diverse and broad audience of 14 million via the website in 2019, its audience research and advocacy and science communicator teams - as well as drawing on the expertise of its 300 scientists.
Duncan Swain, Partner and Creative Director of Beyond Words says: “Beyond Words Studio specialises in telling very human stories with data - and what could be more human than tracking the shifts in people’s movements and habits since COVID-19 has spread across the world? It's an amazing opportunity to be able to explore datasets with the Natural History Museum’s scientists, and we're super-excited to create some beautiful visualizations of the changing impacts we’re all having on the environment around us.
You can learn more about the Museum’s work on their website.
