The UK-virtual Environmental Specimen Bank (UK-vESB) is a catalogue describing specimen and sample holdings. The UK-vESB was designed to enable sharing of available archived specimens, best practice, expertise and data. The catalogue may also help the research community to identify colleagues who are experts in the field, collaboration partners and spare capacity in archive facilities. The UK-vESB is an open access catalogue of UK specimen and archive collections, and other global or European networks and organisations committed to sharing samples and expertise. We strongly encourage you to view the catalogue at https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/sa/documents and create an entry for your facility or specimen collection. Multiple entries for the same organisation are permitted (e.g. sub-groups within a museum with specific contact and access arrangements), as are umbrella collections that describe a collection or collaboration. To create an entry, contributors should first create a user account at https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/sso/signup providing an email address, name and a password. Please contact Jacky Chaplow at jgar@ceh.ac.uk for more information and assistance.

This work was carried out under the UK-SCAPE programme which started in 2018 and is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council as National Capability (award number NE/R016429/1).