to adopt or expand practices that, though
they may not restore lost revenue, are
keeping the public engaged and research
ticking along: an online biodiversity con-
test, public discussions on Zoom, a web-
cam streaming captive corals. Curators are
also expanding and refining digital collec-
tions that are accessible to both the public
and homebound researchers.
“We are seeing more changes in the mu-
seum industry at this moment than we
could push people to make previously,”
says Julie Stein, director of the Burke Mu-
seum of Natural History and Culture at the
University of Washington, Seattle, whose
own institution has been devastated. The
Burke Museum had opened a new build-
ing in October 2019 and was “headed for
record-breaking revenue,” Stein says—until
the entire campus shut down on 6 March.
Some museums, including the Smith-
sonian Institution’s National Museum
of Natural History in Washington, D.C.,
have dodged financial cliffs thanks to
government support. The Natural History
Museum, London, stayed afloat with emer-
gency support from the U.K. government,
but furloughed half its staff until the end
of June. Similarly, the Field Museum has
thus far avoided layoffs thanks to a cash re-
serve and the federal paycheck protection
program, says President and CEO Richard
Lariviere. But 30% of the museum’s income
comes from tickets and related activities,
and $17 million is already lost. Given that
cases of COVID-19 have yet to peak in Il-
linois, Lariviere doubts the museum will
open this summer, and worries he will be
forced to make layoffs.
Some university museums managed to
avoid layoffs now, but may pay a price later
if university budgets shrink. Harvard Uni-
versity’s Peabody Museum of Archaeologyand Ethnology will likely not reopen as
quickly as stand-alone museums, says Di-
rector Jane Pickering.
As they worry about the future, re-
searchers are also distraught because
they can’t pursue their current research.
Travel restrictions have brought fieldwork
to a screeching halt—and with it, the ad-
dition of more specimens to collections.
The American Museum of Natural His-
tory alone has canceled 100 expeditions.
And researchers can’t get into buildings
to analyze existing collections. “We have
been cut off from our collections, facilities,
and colleagues,” says Anjali Goswami, a
paleobiologist at the Natural History Mu-
seum, London.
One trend accelerated by the crisis could
help: efforts to digitize natural history col-
lections. At Harvard’s Museum of Com-
parative Zoology, staff working from home
have been busy enhancing the millions of
records in the museumwide database, for
example adding latitude and longitude
coordinates to specimens thus far identi-
fied only by location names. “There’s a
tremendous amount of data locked into
collections,” says Kirk Johnson, director of
the National Museum of Natural History,
where detailed digital images of pressed
plants in the herbarium allow research-
ers to scrutinize them from afar. “We are
now shining the light on the dark data
of museums.”
Rebecca Albright, a coral biologist at the
California Academy of Sciences, is study-
ing the mysteries of coral spawning; only
one other research team has been able to
get the corals to reproduce in a lab set-
ting. Recently, Albright identified just the
right conditions, including water tempera-
ture and lighting that re-create changing
day length and the cycling of the Moon, toprompt spawning. When she learned that
she couldn’t be in the museum at the key
time, she and her colleagues set up an in-
frared webcam. “We never set up a camera
before because we didn’t need to,” she says.
The livestreaming camera allowed them
to catch spawning in the act on 22 April,
Earth Day—and made a big splash on the
web. “If we had missed this, we would have
had to wait a whole year,” Albright says.
The corals now have 1.6 million followers.
Other scientists have refocused their re-
search on the pandemic itself. Roopnarine
previously studied how nature recovered
from mass extinctions. Now, he is re-
purposing his computer models of eco-
system recovery to evaluate how various
employment schemes may get economies
back on track as lockdowns ease. “Our
work has never been more relevant than it
is now,” he says.
Many see the pandemic as an opportu-
nity for change. “I’m doing more public pro-
grams than ever—in virtual formats,” says
Sabrina Sholts, a biological anthropologist
at the National Museum of Natural History.
To engage the public in research, the
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
County and the California Academy of
Sciences in April enlisted thousands of
citizen scientists in a global biodiversity
effort called the City Nature Challenge.
Participants gathered thousands of images
of birds, insects, and other wildlife in more
than 250 cities to help researchers study
urban ecosystems.
The pandemic itself is inspiring new di-
rections. Leonard Krishtalka, director of
the University of Kansas Biodiversity Insti-
tute and Natural History Museum, wants
museums to expand their focus to include
microbes and viruses.
At the National Museum of Natural His-
tory, Sholts was already thinking along
those lines when she pulled together a
temporary exhibit inspired by the 2014
Ebola epidemic. “Outbreak,” which ex-
plores how pathogens spread between ani-
mals and people, opened 2 years ago. After
COVID-19 erupted, the exhibit was repli-
cated online, with a digital version in half
a dozen languages; a DIY kit has already
been adapted in 41 countries and 30 U.S.
states and territories.
“We are in the process of reinventing
what natural history museums are for,”
Johnson says, speaking by phone to a re-
porter as he walked past the darkened
halls of the Outbreak exhibit. “Museums
can play a much more impactful role than
they have in the past 50 years.” jSCIENCE sciencemag.org 5 JUNE 2020 • VOL 368 ISSUE 6495 1043PHOTO: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES
The Field Museum of Natural History hosted a
socially distanced blood drive in its empty halls.Published by AAAS