Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences

The Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences is one of the ten federal scientific establishments that are governed by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO). It is involved in important scientific research activities and carries out public service missions. It is open to everyone through the Museum of Natural Sciences.

With 37 million specimens conserved as Belgian heritage of universal significance, the RBINS’s collections serve above all as reference and research tools. Just behind London and Paris in European classification, the collections in Brussels have been awarded the European label of ‘major research infrastructure’ and in this respect are constantly being visited and studied by researchers from around the world.

For several years now, the RBINS has been committed to an ambitious programme to digitise its collections and to do so has developed an open-source software, DaRWIN, which has made it possible to encode all the data on any collection of specimens, whatever their taxonomical group.