iCollections methodology: workflow, results and lessons learned

Blagoderov, Vladimir; Penn, Malcolm; Sadka, Mike; Hine, Adrian; Brooks, Stephen J.; Siebert, Darrell J.; Sleep, Chris; Cafferty, Steve; Cane, Elisa; Martin, Geoff; Toloni, Flavia; Wing, Peter; Chainey, John E.; Duffell, Liz; Huxley, R.; Ledger, Sophie; McLaughlin, Caitlin; Mazzetta, Gerardo; Perera, Jasmin; Crowther, Robyn; Douglas, Lyndsey; Durant, Joanna; Scialabba, Elisabetta; Honey, Martin R.; Huertas, Blanca; Howard, Theresa M.; Carter, Victoria; Albuquerque, Sara; Paterson, Gordon L.J.; Kitching, Ian J.

doi:10.3897/bdj.5.e21277

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…We digitised all UK V. vulgaris , V. germanica and V. crabro specimens held by the NHM, totalling 1830 specimens collected between 1884 and 2016. Digitisation involved recording all information on specimen labels including collection date and location to the most detailed level available, as well as georeferencing by assigning point coordinates to all collection locations and estimating associated error radii (for protocol, see Blagoderov et al ., 2017). We assigned all point coordinates to 1 × 1 km grid cells and removed records with location error radii greater than 10 km.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A century of social wasp occupancy trends from natural history collections: spatiotemporal resolutions have little effect on model performance

Jönsson

Broad

Sumner

et al. 2021

Insect Conserv Diversity

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The current dearth of long‐term insect population trends is a major obstacle to conservation. Occupancy models have been proposed as a solution, but it remains unclear whether they can yield long‐term trends from natural history collections, since specimen records are normally very sparse. A common approach for sparse data is to coarsen its spatial and/or temporal resolution, although coarsening risks violating model assumptions. We (i) test whether occupancy trends of three social wasp (Hymenoptera: Vespidae: Vespinae) species – the common wasp (Vespula vulgaris), the German wasp (Vespula germanica) and the European hornet (Vespa crabro) – have changed in England between 1900 and 2016, and (ii) test the effect of spatiotemporal resolution on the performance of occupancy models using very sparse data. All models are based on an integrated dataset of occurrence records and natural history collection specimen records. We show that occupancy models can yield long‐term species‐specific trends from very sparse natural history collection specimens. We present the first quantitative trends for three Vespinae species in England over 116 years. Vespula vulgaris and V. germanica show stable trends over the time series, whilst V. crabro's occupancy decreased from 1950 to 1970 and increased since 1970. Moreover, we show that spatiotemporal resolution has little effect on model performance, although coarsening the spatial grain is an appropriate method for achieving enough records to estimate long‐term changes. With the increasing availability of biological records, the model formulation used here has the potential to provide novel insights by making use of natural history collections' unique specimen assemblages.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A century of social wasp occupancy trends from natural history collections: spatiotemporal resolutions have little effect on model performance

Jönsson

Broad

Sumner

et al. 2021

Insect Conserv Diversity

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“…NHMUK's georeferencing protocols and geographical standards (Penn et al 2017), that provide instructions on how to mark missing or uncertain information in the correct fields and how to georeference general spatial locations (Blagoderov et al 2017).…”

Section: Example Of Different Romanisation Systems Based On Qinghai Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Approximately 5.1 million of these specimens are in the botany collection (Natural History Museum 2020). This collection includes scientifically and culturally important specimens collected from the 16th century up to the present day and the collection is still increasing (Penn et al 2017). Within the NHM botanical collections, there are approximately 137,000 botanical type specimens which are of great importance to taxonomic and biodiversity research, as a type "is that element to which the name of a taxon is permanently attached" (Wiersema et al 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Georeferencing the Natural History Museum's Chinese type collection: of plateaus, pagodas and plants

Lohonya¹,

Livermore²,

Penn³

2020

BDJ

Self Cite

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The digitising efforts of herbaria aim to increase access to and impact of scientific collections, by making the data digitally accessible to the global community. Digitising the NHMUK’s botanical collection of around 5.1 million specimens is an ongoing process, but the majority of the type collections have already been imaged. The Chinese type collection has also been transcribed; however, during the recent georeferencing process, we realised that much of the data had been transcribed incorrectly, particularly the locality information in which 80% of the collection contained errors. We discovered 154 specimens that were mistakenly filed in China. We corrected the mistakes from the previous transcription and georeferenced the collection which consists of 3,736 records. In this paper, we discuss the problems and errors we encountered during the georeferencing process, detailing why there were mistakes, what made the transcription harder than expected and what could have led to errors. We also give a short description about the Chinese language and its difference from European languages, leading to complex problems for georeferencing. We provide a brief guide on how to georeference a Chinese collection, avoiding errors and making the georeferencing process easier and faster.

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“…Such imagery, therefore, accelerates the search and examination of the specimens. The images are placed inside databases enabling rapid access and sorting according to any search term and criteria …”

Section: Analysis Of the Physical Aspects Of Nhc Phenotypic Diversitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this essay, they asked for great works of natural history to be re‐edited, translated, and re‐published to make them readable to a modern audience. In some cases, the archived material has been “digitized” and published online for the prospective biomimicry practitioner . Digitization is an excellent beginning, and the extension of this is to survey the physical collections in some detail.…”

Section: Analysis Of the Physical Aspects Of Nhc Phenotypic Diversitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Natural History Collections as Inspiration for Technology

et al. 2019

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Living organisms are the ultimate survivalists, having evolved phenotypes with unprecedented adaptability, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and versatility compared to human technology. To harness these properties, functional descriptions and design principles from all sources of biodiversity information must be collated − including the hundreds of thousands of possible survival features manifest in natural history museum collections, which represent 12% of total global biodiversity. This requires a consortium of expert biologists from a range of disciplines to convert the observations, data, and hypotheses into the language of engineering. We hope to unite multidisciplinary biologists and natural history museum scientists to maximize the coverage of observations, descriptions, and hypotheses relating to adaptation and function across biodiversity, to make it technologically useful. This is to be achieved by developments in meta‐ taxonomic classification, phylogenetics, systematics, biological materials research, structure and morphological characterizations, and ecological data gathering from the collections − the aim being to identify and catalogue features essential for good biomimetic design.

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iCollections methodology: workflow, results and lessons learned

Cited by 7 publications

References 5 publications

A century of social wasp occupancy trends from natural history collections: spatiotemporal resolutions have little effect on model performance

A century of social wasp occupancy trends from natural history collections: spatiotemporal resolutions have little effect on model performance

Georeferencing the Natural History Museum's Chinese type collection: of plateaus, pagodas and plants

Natural History Collections as Inspiration for Technology

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