Collections‐based systematics: Opportunities and outlook for 2050

Abstract

Systematic biology is a discipline rooted in collections. These collections play important roles in research and conservation and are integral to our efforts to educate society about biodiversity and conservation. Collections provide an invaluable record of the distribution of organisms throughout the world and through recent and geological time, and they are the only direct documentation of the biological, physical, and cultural diversity of the planet: past, present, and future. Recent developments in bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure are transforming systematics by opening up new opportunities and as a result major digitization efforts have increasingly made available large amounts of biodiversity data. The collections‐based systematics community needs to train the next‐generation of systematists with integrative skills, address grand questions about biodiversity at different scales, develop a community‐wide cyberinfrastructure, effectively disseminate systematic data to biologists and the public, and proactively educate the public and policy makers on the importance of systematics and collections in the biodiversity crisis of the Anthropocene. Specifically, we call for a new global Biodiversity CyberBank, comparable to GenBank for genetic data, to be the repository of all biodiversity data, as well as a World Organization of Systematic Biology to lead major initiatives of the field. We also outline a new workflow for taxonomic monographs, which utilizes both the traditional strengths of synthesizing diverse collections‐based taxonomic data and the capacity of online resources and bioinformatics tools.

The time has come for Natural History Collections to claim co‐authorship of research articles

“…They include: (i) encouraging NHC managers and curators to provide scientists with material (as far as it does not diminish the scientific value of a specimen) and data; (ii) promoting more NHC-based research, contributing to an acceleration in the pace of species discovery and allowing a wealth of investigations on biodiversity that could provide crucial information to confront environmental threats; (iii) proposing a more scientific, appropriate alternative to the sale of samples, DNA, or data, which does not appear to conform to the ideal of academic, non-commercial research; (iv) avoiding the assignment of co-authorship to a given staff member of the NHC as simply a pay-back or even an incentive for providing samples or data (by including the NHC as an author there would be a better reflection of the true but invisible expertise provided by the past and present scientific communities to collectively enrich and curate a collection); and (v) improving the recognition of the scientific value of NHC that could help raise more core funding for their routine functioning, especially funding from national governments or the private sector. Ultimately, this would hopefully prevent further closures of NHC and raise awareness of the importance of training and recruiting highlevel taxonomists to further collect material in the field and curate NHC as has already been advocated by others (Wen & al., 2015;Ferreira & al., 2016).…”

An Integrated Information System on Bioresource Collections of the Faso of Russia

“…Создание и поддержание коллекций направлено на ре шение ряда фундаментальных и прикладных задач, среди которых систематика и таксономия организмов (Wen et al, 2015), моделирование экологических ниш (Anderson, 2012) и биогеография (Gillespie, 2013). Коллекции микро организмов -важный элемент инфраструктуры научных исследований и промышленных разработок в области биотехнологий и пищевой индустрии (Boundy Mills, 2012).…”

Arctic science education using public museum collections from the University of Alaska Museum: an evolving and expanding landscape

“…While natural history collections represent primary sources and are used in high-impact science research (Graham et al 2004;Elith et al 2006;Cook et al 2014Cook et al , 2016Wen et al 2015), they can also be used in object-based learning (Chatterjee 2010;Chatterjee and Duhs 2010) outside of a docent-guided museum tour. Bringing collections and associated research into the classroom provides the opportunity to engage students in real-world science investigations.…”