The ZFMK is a zoological research museum dedicated to taxonomy and inventorying of terrestrial and freshwater faunas, with a special focus on tropical habitats. Curators are simultaneously researchers and collection keepers.
Our institute has a unique Center for Molecular Biodiversity Research that is leading phylogenomic projects and the German Barcode of Life (GBOL) initiative. The Center is also well known for its theoretical work and the development of algorithms needed to analyze molecular data.
The ZFMK plays a leading role in the organization of supraregional research networks (e.g. biodiversity research in Indonesia, in Georgia, monitoring in West Africa, phylogenomics of insects etc.). The expertise of our scientists is demanded for research collaborations and for capacity building, and our publications address an international audience. Research projects of (seemingly) only local relevance are also of increasing relevance, because awareness for biodiversity losses in Central Europe is growing. Our collections harbor specimens from all over the world and are used by the international scientific community, including Ph.D. students from abroad (e.g. Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Colombia etc.). We are data providers for GBIF, BOLD, NCBI, GGBN.
If an industrialized country like Germany wants to take its responsibility for planet earth’s biosphere seriously, it has to run facilities for species-based biodiversity research. German universities have lost most of their capacity in this field of science and are not suitable for long-term tasks. Germany has signed the Convention on Biodiversity and is committed to identification, monitoring and conservation of biodiversity. Recently, Bonn was chosen for the UN secretariat of the IPBES. The “Nationale Strategie zur biologischen Vielfalt” (National Biodiversity Strategy), accepted in 2007 by the federal cabinet, includes many recommendations and conditions for the development and use of German landscapes which require monitoring of biodiversity. Research for the goals of this strategy has to be done in institutes with species knowledge, voucher collections, and historical data that document landscape and diversity changes. ZFMK is committed to develop data bases and research tools for a comprehensive biodiversity monitoring. GBOL is an example for the development of tools and for networking including citizen scientists to overcome this impediment. Our taxonomists are experts for the compilation of lists of protected species (CITES lists of the Washington Species Protection Plan, red lists) and cooperate e.g. with the Bundesamt für Naturschutz (Federal Agency for Nature Conservation).
The taxonomic expertise of curators comprises globally terrestrial and freshwater animal taxa, without geographical focus. Taxonomic research is integrative, i.e. combining morphological data (incl. histology and 3D-recosntructions) with molecular sequence information. In view of the enormous number of unknown species, we are using tools to speed up species descriptions, and for rapid inventorying we rely on inverse taxonomy, i.e. characterizing species with automatized methods prior to conventional species descriptions. The phylogenetic expertise is distinguished by a critical analysis of information contents of data, the search for sources of errors at the algorithmic level, and the development of new tools for phylogenetic analyses of sequence data.
Link of the Research page : ZFMK Research
Link of the Annual report : Annual Reports (German only)
