The Department of Entomology at the Natural History Museum houses one of the largest insect collections in the world, with approximately 34 million specimens from all biogeographical regions. The collection includes Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, Hemiptera, Orthoptera, and numerous other smaller orders, broadly representing the diversity of both terrestrial and aquatic insects. The collections are of outstanding historical and scientific value, with material dating back to the seventeenth century, including type specimens and material collected during classic natural history expeditions. Part of the collection has been digitised and made available online, with ongoing efforts to expand and enhance data quality. Only records originating from South America are represented here.

Conditions for using the data

The Natural History Museum is committed to the principles of Open Access and Open Science, promoting open access to its research and data. To this end, it has launched the Data Portal (https://data.nhm.ac.uk), which makes its research and collections datasets available online, allowing anyone to explore, download and reuse the information for their own studies.

How to cite

Cite according to the guidelines of the Natural History Museum Data Portal (https://data.nhm.ac.uk/about/citation), including the dataset identifier and the date of access.

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