Haus der Natur

The Haus der Natur exists since 1924 and is a universal museum of natural sciences with a regional and international focus as well as a centre of natural competence for the city and province of Salzburg.

The first voluntary working group with a direct connection to the Haus der Natur was founded in 1935 as the "Zoological-Botanical Working Group of the Natural History Museum". Over time, this has developed into today's eight working groups, in which over 200 volunteers currently work in close co-operation with the museum. The topics range from inanimate nature (astronomy, mineralogy and palaeontology) to various areas of biology (botany, entomology, malacology, herpetology, ornithology and mammalogy).

As citizen science in the best sense of the word, the working groups define their goals and tasks themselves. However, the core task is always the exploration, documentation and communication of Salzburg's nature. In addition to the museum's physical collections, the biodiversity database at the Haus der Natur, which currently contains around 2.5 million distribution data records on animals, plants and fungi, also plays a central role here.

The nature observation platform Observation.org and the associated apps (ObsIdentify, ObsMapp, iObs) are used by the working groups to record mapping and observation data. Haus der Natur has been an official partner of the Observation International Foundation since 2019 and is actively involved in the further development and popularisation of Observation.org in Austria.