Founded in 1930, the Harrison Institute is a UK charity that specialises in

mammal Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur or ...

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

and

biodiversity Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic (''genetic variability''), species (''species diversity''), and ecosystem (''ecosystem diversity'') l ...

studies in the Old World tropics and subtropics, especially southern and southeast

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an area ...

Arabia The Arabian Peninsula, (; ar, شِبْهُ الْجَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِيَّة, , "Arabian Peninsula" or , , "Island of the Arabs") or Arabia, is a peninsula of Western Asia, situated northeast of Africa on the Arabian Plate. ...

and eastern

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

Mission

The Harrison Institute seeks to promote and facilitate

conservation Conservation is the preservation or efficient use of resources, or the conservation of various quantities under physical laws. Conservation may also refer to: Environment and natural resources * Nature conservation, the protection and manageme ...

through: * Collaborative scientific research * Training staff and students from UK and foreign institutions * Promoting international scientific networks The Harrison Institute provides training for counterparts from a range of Eurasian and African countries. Capacity building and skills development are offered in a series of subjects including project design, field survey techniques, analysing data, preparing scientific reports and publications and the conservation and management of zoological collections.

Zoological collections

The Harrison Institute is home to over 50,000 scientific specimens. Its collection includes 33,000 recent and

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

mammals and 19,000 birds. The fossil mammal collection is growing rapidly and contains holdings of national and international importance. These include

Quaternary The Quaternary ( ) is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). It follows the Neogene Period and spans from 2.58 million years ...

faunas from the UK and Poland and

Tertiary Tertiary ( ) is a widely used but obsolete term for the geologic period from 66 million to 2.6 million years ago. The period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, at the start ...

faunas from the UK. The Recent bird collection is the oldest collection in the Institute with some specimens prepared in the first half of the 19th century. The collection was obtained by

James James is a common English language surname and given name: *James (name), the typically masculine first name James * James (surname), various people with the last name James James or James City may also refer to: People * King James (disambiguat ...

and Jeffery Harrison and is focused on the Palaearctic region, with an emphasis on wildfowl. It includes the Ticehurst and Billy Paine collections and some of the

Hastings Rarities The Hastings Rarities affair is a case of statistically demonstrated ornithological fraud that misled the bird world for decades in the 20th century. The discovery of the long-running hoax shocked ornithologists. The Hastings Rarities were a se ...

. The institute's collection of 19,000 birds, representing 884 species, was donated to the

Vienna Natural History Museum The Natural History Museum Vienna (german: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien) is a large natural history museum located in Vienna, Austria. It is one of the most important natural history museums worldwide. The NHM Vienna is one of the largest museum ...

in 2022 for the purposes of scientific research.

Expeditions

In the last 50 years the Harrison Institute has organised or participated in over 75 field surveys and expeditions to 36 countries in 5 continents. Each has been concerned with an aspect of natural history and was part of a wider programme of conservation or wildlife studies involving scientific institutions from the host country.

History

The Harrison Institute was founded by James Harrison in 1930. Based at Bowerwood House in

Sevenoaks Sevenoaks is a town in Kent with a population of 29,506 situated south-east of London, England. Also classified as a civil parishes in England, civil parish, Sevenoaks is served by a commuter South Eastern Main Line, main line railway into Lon ...

, some 40 km from central

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

, the Institute originally focused on the study of British and Palaearctic birds. In 1971, its zoological collections were recognised as being of national and international importance and it became a charitable trust (No 268830). In 1986, it was further recognised as a Registered Scientific Institution by the then Department of the Environment (now the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), a UK Government Department and was listed under

CITES CITES (shorter name for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, also known as the Washington Convention) is a multilateral treaty to protect endangered plants and animals from the threats of interna ...

. Under the leadership of David Harrison (James's younger son), the Institute increasingly focused on the study and conservation of mammals. Conservation initiatives were concentrated in Arabia and scientific publications were primarily concerned with the Old World tropics and subtropics. More recently, the Institute has been involved in research, training and scientific expeditions to East Africa, the Indian Subcontinent and South-East Asia. It also researches the Tertiary and Quaternary UK mammal faunas.

References

* * * * *{{cite book, title=The Thames Transformed , year=1976 , first1=Jeffery , last1=Harrison , first2=Peter , last2=Grant , isbn=0-233-96840-7

External links