CSIRO has opened a $90 million, purpose-built facility in Canberra to safeguard more than 13 million biodiversity specimens and boost research into Australia’s natural environment.
Named Diversity, the building consolidates the Australian National Wildlife Collection and the Australian National Insect Collection for the first time, bringing together material gathered over 150 years. The site features temperature-controlled vaults designed to be bushfire- and pest-resistant, and is supported by new genomics laboratories and digitisation suites to extract more data from specimens and link physical collections with digital platforms.
The project was jointly funded by CSIRO and the Department of Education through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.
CSIRO chief executive Dr Doug Hilton said the facility would help researchers, government and industry to better monitor the environment, pests and weeds, protect endangered species, prevent disease, and support the sustainable use of nature. “For more than a century, our collections have quietly underpinned Australian science, policy, agriculture, biosecurity, and biodiversity conservation,” Dr Hilton said. “They are a hidden powerhouse, supporting everything from tracking pest incursions to discovering new species and understanding the genetic diversity of Australia’s native ecosystems. “This work contributes directly to the national interest. It informs biosecurity actions, climate resilience strategies, and land management activities. It helps us answer one of the most pressing questions of our time: How do we protect biodiversity in a changing world?”
CSIRO says the facility will expand access to the collections for researchers, governments and citizen scientists around the world, even though Diversity itself is a research facility and not open to the public.
Toni Moate, CSIRO’s Director for National Collections and Marine Infrastructure, said the new building is the newest purpose-built collections facility in the world. “Our research teams here keep finding new ways to use our biological collections to create a better future for Australians – from using spider wasp venoms to source new pharmaceuticals, all the way through to using historic reptile collections to track how animals respond to climate change,” Ms Moate said. “This new facility will only accelerate this incredible work and enable us to move into new areas of research.”
Dr Clare Holleley, Director of the Australian National Wildlife Collection, said the collections are a vital record at a time of unprecedented global biodiversity decline. “The potential held within our biological collections is huge and, through this facility, we’re changing the way they are used and shared,” Dr Holleley said. “Collection specimens allow us to better-understand long term trends in environmental response and to help prepare species for the challenges of the future. “In this new building, we’re solving the problems that nature presents to us in real time. “Our researchers are often the very first people in the world to see a particular specimen, sequence a gene or put together pieces of the puzzle in a way never been done before – it’s incredibly rewarding.”
Architecture firm Hassell designed the building in close consultation with collections researchers and engineers over 10 months. Construction began in autumn 2022 and was completed just over two years later. Moving the specimens into their new vaults took around a year.
Key holdings now under one roof include:
– About 55,000 birds, representing roughly 99 per cent of Australian bird species, and the most comprehensive collection of Australian and Papua New Guinean birds in the southern hemisphere
– 17,000 orchids preserved in ethanol
– 31,000 historical egg clutches from more than 1,000 bird species
– 37,000 tissue samples from more than 23,000 individual bird specimens, forming the world’s largest cryo-frozen tissue bank of Australian birds and a major repository of Papua New Guinean bird tissues
– The world’s largest collection of Australian insects and related invertebrates, totalling more than 12 million specimens, including about 2.4 million moths and butterflies and over 7 million beetles.
