Going, Going, Gone The Diminishing Capacity of Museum Specimen Collections to Address Global Change Research: A Case Study on Urban Reptiles

Abstract

It has been increasingly popular to use natural history specimens to examine environmental changes. As the current functionality of museum specimens has extended beyond their traditional taxonomic role, there has been a renewed focus on the completeness of biological collections to provide data for current and future research. We used the collections of the Western Australian Museum to answer questions about the change in occurrence of five common reptile species due to the rapid urbanization of Perth. We recorded a significant decline in collection effort from the year 2000 onwards (F = 7.65, p < 0.01) compared to the period 1990–1999. Spatial analysis revealed that only 0.5% of our study region was well sampled, 8.5% were moderately sampled and the majority of the regions (91%) were poorly sampled. By analysing the trend of specimen acquisition from 1950 to 2010, we discovered a significant inconsistency in specimen sampling effort for 13 common reptile species across time and space. A large proportion of past specimens lacked information including the place and time of collection. An increase in investment to museums and an increase in geographically and temporally systematic collecting is advocated to ensure that collections can answer questions about environmental change.

Ecological Civilization COP 15 and Amphibian Sustainability through Reproduction Technologies, Biobanking, and Conservation Breeding Programs (RBCs)

“…Genetic diversity can be held as tissues, cells, viable nuclei, mitochondria, DNA, mRNA, and Genomic Restoration Databases [187], however, only cryopreserved cells and tissues can currently recover individuals [4,9,10,12,16,188]. Vouchered specimens support proactive amphibian sustainability by relating genotypic to phenotypic characteristics within ecological contexts [146,[189][190][191][192] by providing information on the life, history, biology, longevity, pathology, and growth rates of amphibians [187,191]. This information contributes to the epidemiology of amphibian extinctions and declines from Chytrid [187,193] and assists with balancing conservation with economic development in highly amphibian biodiverse regions [190].…”