The Virtual Museum of Ecosystems and Natural Environments

This virtual museum is an information and learning tool primarily devoted to high school and university students, but also by anyone interested in understanding how the natural world around us works.
It may be ‘virtual’ but it cannot and must not replace direct real-world experience: a walk in a natural park, on a mountain, in a forest or in a wetland area... It is therefore an invitation for you to get to know and experience, first-hand, the importance and beauty of nature, enjoying the wind, smells, sounds and colours all around us.

This virtual museum includes four instances of natural environments, each with its own complete room: the mountains, marine coastal wetlands, semi-arid regions and the Arctic. The first three ecosystems are found in Italy. Arctic areas, on the other hand, are important for the relationships they have, in terms of ecology and climate, with the other regions of the planet. They have been studied for decades by the Italian scientific research community. Inside each room, we will find ourselves in a main location described in detail, but we can also make short visits to other areas showing the same type of environment, but with different features. We enter each room through an intro space, a sort of prelude to the visit that describes what ecosystems are, what biodiversity is, how they can be studied, as well as how they can and must be preserved.

Biodiversity is the totality of life forms occurring on Earth. The number of species present in a region is one of the most used ways to express its biodiversity. But biodiversity is also the variety of ecosystems, which in turn are made up of the habitats where the different species of plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms live. And each species, in its turn, can be divided into different populations that are also subject to internal genetic diversity, since no one individual is the same as another. Biodiversity is currently under severe threat from human activities that have wiped out a great number of species and caused widespread natural habitat loss. Conservation and restoration of biodiversity are therefore a global priority today.

Geodiversity – also known as ‘biodiversity’s silent partner’ – is the totality of forms, materials and processes that make up the Earth’s geological, geochemical and geomorphological component. Geodiversity has its origins in phenomena happening inside the Earth, in the diversity of rocks and in the processes that generated them, in the diversity of minerals – with their multitude of forms, colours, crystalline structures – and in the complex geomorphology of the surface of our planet. Geodiversity underlies the wealth of natural landscapes and governs the biodiversity of living organisms, as well as of ecosystems and environments, controlling and altering them, and being in its turn deeply influenced by biological processes.

An ecosystem is a set of living organisms, physical, chemical and geological variables, and the processes and interactions occurring among them, giving rise to a complex interacting system. The concept of ecosystem has ushered in a new way of approaching the study of nature: in ecology, the line between energy and matter is more blurred and the focus of attention is increasingly on the totality of relationships and interactions between species, as well as between species and the environment. This approach is based on the work of the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who in the late 18th and early decades of the 19th century laid the foundations for a vision of nature as a large complex of interconnected cycles and processes.