Learning by Doing: Building Tanzania’s Next Generation of Natural History Collections Experts at UDSM

There is something particularly satisfying about a training course where the classroom quickly becomes a laboratory, a museum collection, a field site or even the floor around a workbench covered in specimens, notebooks and equipment.

That was very much the spirit of the recent Hazina Collections Development Programme training at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), where Greg Pandelis and Christian Thrane spent several weeks working with students and curatorial staff to strengthen practical skills in herpetology, collections management and biodiversity research.

The training was part of the wider Hazina programme, which aims to build Tanzania’s capacity in biodiversity collections, specimen preparation, databasing, taxonomy, field survey techniques and museum-based research.

And importantly, this wasn't designed to be a traditional lecture course. The philosophy was simple: introduce the theory, demonstrate the technique, and then let people have a go themselves.

From the collection room to the laboratory

The first days focused on amphibians and reptiles, beginning with discussions about why natural history collections matter and how specimens can support research and conservation. Greg was impressed by the existing knowledge of the students. Discussions about the purpose of collecting, ethics and the potential uses of museum specimens quickly became interactive, with students contributing their own ideas about how collections could support biodiversity research.

Then came the practical work. Students and curators learned how to prepare amphibian and reptile specimens, including tissue sampling, measurements, photography, fixation, labelling and recording the associated data. These are deceptively detailed processes: getting a specimen into a jar is one thing; creating a well-prepared, accurately documented specimen that will remain useful to researchers decades from now is quite another.

And there were mistakes as there inevitably are when learning a new practical skill.

The important thing was that people were doing the work themselves. As Greg noted, specimen preparation cannot really be mastered in a single day. It requires repeated practice, with continued guidance from experienced curators.

Gregory explaining to students and curators about preservation of specimens

            Students and Curators practicing what Gregory has taught them

Learning to identify reptiles

One of the highlights was a practical session on reptile identification and dichotomous keys.

After an introduction to the principles behind identification keys and the characters used to distinguish reptiles, students moved around a series of practical stations, identifying specimens for themselves. It proved to be more popular than expected.

So popular, in fact, that students continued working through their identifications beyond the scheduled session and even stayed through lunch.

The exercise also introduced an important lesson about taxonomy: identification keys don't always give you the answer you want. Students encountered ambiguities and situations where a key simply stopped working. Rather than seeing this as failure, they learned what to do next – going back to original species descriptions and other sources of information.

That combination of practical skill and problem-solving is exactly what the Hazina programme is trying to encourage.

Gregory explaining to students and curators about some of the techniques of identifying snakes

Bringing collections into the digital age

The training then moved from jars and specimens to computers. Students were introduced to biodiversity databases, data standards and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), learning how museum information can be accessed and used alongside collections held by institutions around the world.

Rather than simply demonstrating GBIF, Greg had the students use it themselves, searching for information relevant to their own research projects. This led naturally into GIS and Google Earth.

Students explored how specimen records and geographical information could be brought together to understand where biodiversity has been well studied and, perhaps more importantly, where it hasn't. The approach provided a practical way of thinking about future fieldwork: use existing museum and biodiversity data to identify gaps, then target collecting towards places where new surveys could make the greatest contribution.

In other words, the museum collection wasn't being treated simply as a place where old specimens are stored. It became a starting point for deciding where to go next.

From old collection to new collection

The practical work also involved physically moving material into the new collection facility. Around half of the research collection was systematically transferred, with particular attention given to safe packing and transport. Jars were protected inside larger containers, specimens were wrapped to prevent glass and labels from moving around, and containers were labelled to make unpacking easier.

There was even a lesson in something as apparently simple as tying specimen tags. Each curator received a supply of tags and string and learned how to produce consistent lengths of string and secure knots that would remain attached to specimens.

These details might seem mundane compared with the excitement of discovering a new species, but they are the foundations on which a good natural history collection is built.

Old collection at the Department of Zoology and WIldife Conservation

Transporting specimens from old collection to a new collection

New collecton under Hazina project

The collection itself becomes the classroom (Christian Joins the team)

For the curators, much of the training centred on the UDSM collections themselves.

This was particularly revealing. Rather than simply telling the curators how a collection should be organised, Greg and Christian worked with them to explore the collection and think through the problems themselves. Specimens were sorted, jars examined and different approaches to inventory and cataloguing tested.

When some of the first jars contained misplaced or misidentified specimens, the original plan had to be reconsidered. That turned into an extremely useful lesson in itself: collection management is rarely about following a perfect theoretical workflow. It is about understanding the material you actually have and developing a system that is practical, robust and sustainable.

One particularly satisfying moment came when curators were asked to find specimens again after the collection had been roughly sorted. This time, they could find them much more easily.

The exercise demonstrated something fundamental: the people doing the sorting develop an intimate understanding of the collection's structure. Collection management is therefore not just about shelves, databases and labels it is about building knowledge within the people responsible for looking after the specimens.

A moment when Christian joined the team and there was a deep discussion on how cataloguing should be done

Christian and the curators in the new collection preparation room

Christian observing the arrangement of specimens as a result of cataloguing

And then came the teamwork

As the training progressed, the curators began working as a team. A typical workflow involved one person attaching tags, another checking numbers and writing labels, and another entering and checking the information in the database. They then swapped roles so everyone experienced the different parts of the process. This was deliberately designed to move beyond individual skills.

The aim was to create a shared collections workflow that the UDSM team could continue using after the trainers had left. That is one of the most important principles behind Hazina: international expertise can provide a catalyst, but the long-term success of the programme depends on building expertise and confidence within Tanzania.

Taking the museum into the field

The next stage was to connect everything together through field training. Students learned about survey design, field data, GPS, habitat assessment, visual encounter surveys, tissue collection, voucher specimens and data management. Day and night surveys provided an opportunity to practise the techniques in a real environment.

A campus walk provided a smaller-scale opportunity to practise recording observations digitally, using standardised data fields and discussing some of the inevitable ambiguities that arise when collecting ecological information. The lesson was not simply how to collect an animal. It was how to collect an animal with the information that makes the specimen scientifically useful.

That completes the chain:

field survey → specimen → preparation → collection → database → research.

And that complete workflow is at the heart of what Hazina is trying to build.

Christian joins the programme

Christian Thrane brought another important dimension to the training, working with the team on collections auditing, taxonomic research and morphometrics.

This included work on the Nectophrynoides material, with specimens inventoried and measurements prioritised. Students and curators also explored morphological data collection, quantitative and qualitative characters, data quality control and subsequent analysis. The work was particularly valuable because it showed how a well managed collection can become the raw material for research.

A specimen sitting unnoticed in a jar is only part of the story. Once it is correctly identified, catalogued, measured, geographically referenced and linked to other specimens and datasets, it can contribute to questions about taxonomy, evolution, distribution and biodiversity change.

More than a training course

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the whole programme was the enthusiasm of the participants. Feedback after the training was overwhelmingly positive. Students and curators described the programme as practical, engaging, realistic and directly relevant to their research and collections work. Around 80% of the programme was practical rather than classroom-based – a balance that participants particularly valued.

They reported increased confidence in specimen preparation, tissue sampling, collection management, georeferencing, biodiversity databases and research proposal development.

Greg and Christian were also praised for their complementary approaches: Greg bringing broader concepts around collections and their use, while Christian reinforced practical auditing and curation skills.

But perhaps the most important outcome was that the relationship did not end when the training finished. The longer-term vision is for visiting specialists such as Greg and Christian to become collaborators and mentors – supporting students as their MSc projects develop, contributing to research and publications, and continuing to work with the UDSM team.

Building something that lasts

There is still plenty to do. The training highlighted the need for more introductory support in areas such as GIS, georeferencing and biodiversity databases, more supporting materials and continued opportunities for practical experience.

But these are good problems to have.

The June and July training was regarded as a highly successful pilot, and the lessons learned are already being used to strengthen the next phase of the programme. The longer-term ambition is to develop local trainers and expertise so that Tanzania's capacity continues to grow rather than relying indefinitely on visiting specialists.

Ultimately, Hazina is about much more than learning how to prepare a frog, identify a lizard, enter a specimen into a database or measure a toad.

It is about building a community of people who can discover, document, care for and research Tanzania's extraordinary vertebrate biodiversity. And judging from the enthusiasm around the workbenches at UDSM, that community is already beginning to take shape.