ATHENA: Spot Species in Fine Art

Research
Help us discover plants and animals in Fine art. You can help - while browsing the tremendous collection of the Dutch Rijksmuseum - to classify animal species and any flowering plants, trees or shrubs present. Your gallery trip will include many master pieces of the 16th century up to modern times. Due to the enormous size of the Rijksmuseum collections, the project will focus for the time being on paintings and print art. By classifying these works of art, you contribute to the project of ATHENA and help us build our portal documenting the history of biodiversity in the Netherlands. The results for art pertaining to the Dutch flora and fauna will be published in the ATHENA portal. Moreover, all results (also for non-Dutch art) will be integrated in the Rijksmuseum database.

What is project ATHENA?
ATHENA envisions the creation of a historical database on flora and fauna species in cultural and natural contexts for the Netherlands. The ATHENA portal will hold information on historical contexts of human – nature relationships for a broad variety of plant and animal species and the landscapes and ecosystems they live(d) in. ATHENA does so by linking existing databases, but also by building and incorporating new ones. A wide variety of historical, archaeological and ecological sources are brought together in ATHENA, from species distributions data to paintings, and from bestiaria to newspaper articles. By working with data from different disciplines information quality can be improved significantly. Archaeological data can cover periods with poor historical information and various datasets can be calibrated where there is a temporal overlap in archaeological, historical and observational data. In addition, information on historical, social, cultural and ecological phenomena provides much needed contexts for human-nature relationships research. The interdisciplinary nature of ATHENA will greatly enhance the understanding of such historical relationships, an endeavor not likely to be achieved by a single discipline alone.
ATHENA refers to Athena noctua (or Little owl) which is closely associated with the Greek goddess Athena, and hence represents wisdom and knowledge

The research goals
Aim of the ATHENA project is to develop an internationally unique database allowing researchers from multiple scientific disciplines to study human-nature relationships in an interdisciplinary environment. The resulting database will provide a platform for large-scale, comparative (both in space and time) and multilevel studies of human-nature relationships. The development of the ATHENA database will advance the fields of research involved, and will strengthen high level interdisciplinary research on human – nature interactions. An interdisciplinary approach is necessary to fully understand the impacts and consequences of human nature dialogues. By collecting, combining and integrating information from different historical sources, scientists, policy makers and the broader public can more easily study and articulate changes in mutual relationships between socio-cultural and ecological systems.

Importance of art for the project
In this portal, paintings will be included to show the history of the iconography of animals and fauna in the Netherlands. For this, paintings of the Rijksmuseum are used to distinguish the animals and plants present in art through the years. However, for many paintings it is unknown if and/or which species are depicted. For this, we ask Zooniverse and your help!

Click HERE for more information behind the database

The dataportal
ATHENA aims to create a network of databases that provide state-of-the-art data by means of a data portal that integrates existing and to be developed databases. The data portal gives either direct historical information on species and/or references to relevant sources. The data presented in ATHENA are collected and selected by teams of researchers supported by technology. ATHENA, however, is much more than just a portal to data collections. It aims to combine data, harmonize metadata, develop standards, and provide state-of-the-art visualizations.
Central in ATHENA are ‘species’, meaning not only species in a strict biological sense (indicated by a scientific genus and species name) but also units of higher and lower taxonomic order (Class – Order –Family vs. subspecies and varieties), and even mythical species like basilisks, werewolves and unicorns. Species thus form the main entrance of ATHENA. From this entrance sub-databases are queried, yielding information from historical, archaeological and ecological sources. The portal can be consulted on the following (preliminary) thematic fields; nomenclature, non-fiction literature, art and culture, archaeology, natural history, ecology, socio-economics.

Click HERE for access to the current database