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.e19893

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Bumblebee collections were from Natural History Museum (London), National Museums Scotland (Edinburgh), Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust (Carlisle) and World Museum (Liverpool), and included the species Bombus hortorum , B. lapidarius , B. pascuorum and B. muscorum . We photographed 6,311 specimens using either a Canon EOS 750D camera with a Canon Ultrasonic 100 mm macro lens and a Canon Macro Ring Lite MR‐14EX II flash or following Blagoderov et al ( 2017 ), viz. using Canon EOS 550D and 700D cameras with custom‐built light boxes with 32W Circline VLR Full Spectrum Vita‐Lite 5500K fluorescent ring bulbs.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signatures of increasing environmental stress in bumblebee wings over the past century: Insights from museum specimens

Arce

Cantwell‐Jones

Tansley

et al. 2022

Journal of Animal Ecology

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1. Determining when animal populations have experienced stress in the past is fundamental to understanding how risk factors drive contemporary and future species' responses to environmental change. For insects, quantifying stress and associating it with environmental factors has been challenging due to a paucity of time-series data and because detectable population-level responses can show varying lag effects. One solution is to leverage historic entomological specimens to detect morphological proxies of stress experienced at the time stressors emerged, allowing us to more accurately determine population responses.2. Here we studied specimens of four bumblebee species, an invaluable group of insect pollinators, from five museums collected across Britain over the 20th century. We calculated the degree of fluctuating asymmetry (FA; random deviations from bilateral symmetry) between the right and left forewings as a potential proxy of developmental stress.3. We: (a) investigated whether baseline FA levels vary between species, and how this compares between the first and second half of the century; (b) determined the extent of FA change over the century in the four bumblebee species, and whether this followed a linear or nonlinear trend; (c) tested which annual climatic conditions correlated with increased FA in bumblebees.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signatures of increasing environmental stress in bumblebee wings over the past century: Insights from museum specimens

Arce

Cantwell‐Jones

Tansley

et al. 2022

Journal of Animal Ecology

Self Cite

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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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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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iCollections methodology: workflow, results and lessons learned

Cited by 10 publications

References 6 publications

Signatures of increasing environmental stress in bumblebee wings over the past century: Insights from museum specimens

Signatures of increasing environmental stress in bumblebee wings over the past century: Insights from museum specimens

Natural History Collections as Inspiration for Technology

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

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