Getting science priorities straight: how to increase the reliability of specimen identification?

Abstract

‘We advise the authors to find a native English speaker to proofread the manuscript’. This is a standard feedback journals give to non-native English speakers. Journals are justifiably concerned with grammar but do not show the same rigour about another step crucial to biological research: specimen identification. Surveying the author guidelines of 100 journals, we found that only 6% of them request explicitly citation of the literature used in specimen identification. Authors hamper readers from contesting specimen identification whenever vouchers, identification methods, and taxon concepts are not provided. However, unclear taxonomic procedures violate the basic scientific principle of reproducibility. The scientific community must continuously look for practical alternatives to improve taxonomic identification and taxonomic verification. We argue that voucher pictures are an accessible, cheap and time-effective alternative to mitigate (not abolish) bad taxonomy by exposing preventable misidentifications. Voucher pictures allow scientists to judge specimen identification actively, based on available data. The popularization of high-quality image devices, photo-identification technologies and computer vision algorithms yield accurate scientific photo-documentation, improving taxonomic procedures. Taxonomy is timeless, transversal and essential to most scientific disciplines in biological sciences. It is time to demand rigour in taxonomic identifications.

Eurasian wanderer: an island sabre‐toothed cat (Felidae, Machairodontinae) in the Far East

“…Increasing the reliability of specimen identification is a worldwide issue (Bianchi & Gonçalves 2021). Because of the incomplete nature of fossils, palaeontological research requires substantial efforts to comprehensively curate specimens for re‐examination and provide reliable diagnostic features with detailed photographs and illustrations or 3D data.…”

“…Data for the global distribution of the Pleistocene Homotherium were taken from the Paleobiology Database (http://paleobiodb.org). The species identification of palaeontological and zoological specimens is often problematic, especially when the exact specimen number or its repository institutions are not indicated in the original publication (Bianchi & Gonçalves 2021). We assessed each record by comprehensively and critically reviewing the original publications, and keeping only the reliable Pleistocene occurrences of Homotherium for our comparisons, as summarized in Table 1.…”

Sticky Pi is a high-frequency smart trap that enables the study of insect circadian activity under natural conditions

“…Barcode sequences were deposited in GenBank (accession number SUB11480448). We also took several high-quality images of each specimen before DNA extraction and embedded them in a single table ( S2 Table ) to cross-reference morphology and DNA sequences [ 63 ].…”

Emerging technologies revolutionise insect ecology and monitoring

“…Ongoing role of traditional monitoring Regardless of technological developments, new technologies cannot replace specialist taxonomic knowledge and traditional methods [93]. Instead, new technologies should seek to complement traditional monitoring, to reduce workload, to automate the most taxonomically trivial tasks, and to fill gaps in existing monitoring schemes.…”