Observe
Bring field notes, specimens, images, measurements, and the context needed to understand them.
Observed · Verified · Archived
An open museum for the living and mineral world.
Clio Online Museum is a public place where citizens, researchers, educators and collecting institutions can work side by side around wildlife sightings, field observations, specimens, images, samples, and careful identifications across biology, geology, freshwater, saltwater, microscopy, and astronomy.
Sharpen the observation.
- Mammals
- Birds
- Reptiles & amphibians
- Insects & invertebrates
- Plants & trees
- Fungi
- Marine & freshwater life
- Microscopy
- Geology
- Astronomy
Browse Clio
Find a public museum record.
Search for words in a record’s title, then filter by type, collection, standards, date, country or review status. Exact locations and coordinates are not searchable.
Work with Clio
A public foundation for careful STEM practice.
Clio is a museum for institutions, researchers and creators, students and teachers, and lab or field teams who want observations and evidence to stay useful beyond a single project.
Document
Use shared vocabularies, declared methods, licences, and uncertainty rather than leaving evidence implicit.
Interpret
Compare sources, explain your identification and keep uncertainty visible as evidence develops.
Reference library →Our promise
Useful to the person who found it, and to the science that comes after.
These commitments guide how Clio presents evidence, identity, review and reuse.
To contributors
Clio keeps attribution, licence, source and identification history connected to the personal evidence history you choose to publish, subject to consent, safety, privacy, moderation and preservation limits.
Sign in to contribute →To science
Fields are designed around published vocabularies, with three visible verification tiers and an audit trail for how a record changes.
The standards →To clear communication
Live functions, review states and external boundaries are described plainly, and institutional relationships are named when they are established.
How Clio works →How it works
One observation, held with its context.
Build a private draft with your observations and supporting evidence. Published contributions are public by default.
Keep a personal evidence history
Keep your observations connected to your contributor identity. Protect access with a passkey or passphrase and save your recovery kit.
How identity fits →Present it through Clio
Publish when your draft is ready. Others can find and cite your record. Its review status shows whether the identification has been assessed.
Open the contributor workspace →Reference it at the right level
Cite a record using its Clio permalink and version details. You can request DOI review for eligible published versions; a request does not assign a DOI.
See the record model →Foundations
Standards are part of the record, not an export trick.
Clio’s profile-driven data model uses Darwin Core and Humboldt for observations, REMBI and OME for biological imaging, ABCD-EFG for geology, FITS/WCS and IVOA provenance for astronomy, and EML/DwC-A for dataset context and packaging.
The chain of connection
In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the intellectual advancement of mankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments. Such a result can, however, only be reaped as the fruit of observation and intellect, combined with the spirit of the age, in which are reflected all the varied phases of thought. He who can trace, through by-gone times, the stream of our knowledge to its primitive source, will learn from history how, for thousands of years, man has labored, amid the ever-recurring changes of form, to recognize the invariability of natural laws, and has thus, by the force of mind, gradually subdued a great portion of the physical world to his dominion. In interrogating the history of the past, we trace the mysterious course of ideas yielding the first glimmering perception of the same image of a Cosmos, or harmoniously ordered whole, which, dimly shadowed forth to the human mind in the primitive ages of the world, is now fully revealed to the maturer intellect of mankind as the result of long and laborious observation.
Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, translated by E. C. Otté, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1858), pp. 23–24. Read the Project Gutenberg transcription.
From the museum
News & ideas.
The spirit of the museum
From Helicon's spring to Alexandria's scholars, Clio follows the museum's spirit: preserve evidence with care so future minds can question, learn and see.
6 minute read