scholarly journals Updates to the checklist of the wild bee fauna of Luxembourg as inferred from revised natural history collection data and fieldwork

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernanda Herrera Mesías ◽  
Alexander Weigand
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Conservation Strategies ◽  
Species List ◽  
Wild Bee ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Collection Data ◽  
Taxonomic Groups

Museums and other institutions curating natural history collections (NHCs) are fundamental entities to many scientific disciplines, as they house data and reference material for varied research projects. As such, biological specimens preserved in NHCs represent accessible physical records of the living world's history. They provide useful information regarding the presence and distribution of different taxonomic groups through space and time. Despite the importance of biological museum specimens, their potential to answer scientific questions, pertinent to the necessities of our current historical context, is often under-explored. The currently-known wild bee fauna of Luxembourg comprises 341 registered species distributed amongst 38 different genera. However, specimens stored in the archives of local NHCs represent an untapped resource to update taxonomic lists, including potentially overlooked findings relevant to the development of national conservation strategies. We re-investigated the wild bee collection of the Zoology Department of the National Museum of Natural History Luxembourg by using morphotaxonomy and DNA barcoding. The collection revision led to the discovery of four species so far not described for the country: Andrena lagopus (Latreille, 1809), Nomada furva (Panzer, 1798), Hoplitis papaveris (Latreille, 1799) and Sphecodes majalis (Pérez, 1903). Additionally, the presence of Nomada sexfasciata (Panzer, 1799), which inexplicably had been omitted by the most current species list, can be re-confirmed. Altogether, our findings increase the number of recorded wild bee species in Luxembourg to 346. Moreover, the results highlight the crucial role of NHCs as repositories of our knowledge of the natural world.

scholarly journals Comparison of Automated Georeferencing Tools Using Insect Collection Data

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonor Venceslau ◽  
Luis Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Average Distance ◽  
Sampling Location ◽  
Reference Dataset ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Google Maps ◽  
Reference Location ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
Collection Data ◽  
Insect Collection

Major efforts are being made to digitize natural history collections to make these data available online for retrieval and analysis (Beaman and Cellinese 2012). Georeferencing, an important part of the digitization process, consists of obtaining geographic coordinates from a locality description. In many natural history collection specimens, the coordinates of the sampling location are not recorded, rather they contain a description of the site. Inaccurate georeferencing of sampling locations negatively impacts data quality and the accuracy of any geographic analysis on those data. In addition to latitude and longitude, it is important to define a degree of uncertainty of the coordinates, since in most cases it is impossible to pinpoint the exact location retrospectively. This is usually done by defining an uncertainty value represented as a radius around the center of the locality where the sampling took place. Georeferencing is a time-consuming process requiring manual validation; as such, a significant part of all natural history collection data available online are not georeferenced. Of the 161 million records of preserved specimens currently available in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), only 86 million (53.4%) include coordinates. It is therefore important to develop and optimize automatic tools that allow a fast and accurate georeferencing. The objective of this work was to test existing automatic georeferencing services and evaluate their potential to accelerate georeferencing of large collection datasets. For this end, several open-source georeferencing services are currently available, which provide an application programming interface (API) for batch georeferencing. We evaluated five programs: Google Maps, MapQuest, GeoNames, OpenStreetMap, and GEOLocate. A test dataset of 100 records (reference dataset), which had been previously individually georreferenced following Chapman and Wieczorek 2006, was randomly selected from the Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência, Universidade de Lisboa insect collection catalogue (Lopes et al. 2016). An R (R Core Team 2018) script was used to georeference these records using the five services. In cases where multiple results were returned, only the first one was considered and compared with the manually obtained coordinates of the reference dataset. Two factors were considered in evaluating accuracy: Total number of results obtained and Distance to the original location in the reference dataset. Total number of results obtained and Distance to the original location in the reference dataset. Of the five programs tested, Google Maps yielded the most results (99) and was the most accurate with 57 results < 1000 m from the reference location and 79 within the uncertainty radius. GEOLocate provided results for 87 locations, of which 47 were within 1000 m of the correct location, and 57 were within the uncertainty radius. The other 3 services tested all had less than 35 results within 1000 m from the reference location, and less than 50 results within the uncertainty radius. Google Maps and Open Street Map had the lowest average distance from the reference location, both around 5500 m. Google Maps has a usage limit of around 40000 free georeferencing requests per month, beyond which the service is paid, while GEOLocate is free with no usage limit. For large collections, this may be a factor to take into account. In the future, we hope to optimize these methods and test them with larger datasets.

Roman Climate Awareness in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-282
Author(s):  
Jane Millar
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Agricultural Labor ◽  
Agricultural Communities ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Untapped Resource

This article examines the past and potential contributions of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (NH) on the subject of Roman perceptions and experiences of environmental change. It asks in particular how classicists, archaeologists, and environmental historians can responsibly use the NH as a source on ancient climate. First, it briefly reviews relevant topics in the paleoclimatology of the Roman world, a rapidly advancing discipline enabling the identification of ancient climate changes with increasing precision and confidence (I). The article then turns to the reliability of Pliny as an authority on ancient climate by examining his accuracy, objectivity, and use of source material in literary and historical context, including his rhetorical goals, which have gone understudied until quite recently (II). A close reading of passages on environmental and climate change follows, highlighting areas in which Pliny’s observations are at odds with his source material. The examples discussed demonstrate the importance of phenology (III) and meteorology (IV) in Pliny’s encyclopedic account of the natural world, one characterized by anthropocentrism, pragmatism, and an emphasis on local knowledge. The evidence for ancient climate change is plentiful but not conclusive on the details and timing, and further studies will continue to refine local records. Rather than presenting a synthetic reconstruction based on Pliny’s observations, I argue that his encyclopedia offers an untapped resource on ancient climate and weather, not only by providing evidence of climate change, but also by recommending increased attention to seasonality, agricultural communities, and the lived experience of agricultural labor in order to better understand the effects of climate change on ancient populations.

NATURAL HISTORIES: LEARNING FROM ANIMALS IN T.H. WHITE'S ARTHURIAN SEQUENCE

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-163
Author(s):  
Debbie Sly
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Animal Behaviour ◽  
World War ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Human Limitation ◽  
Ideological Construction

AbstractThis paper examines the changes T.H. White made to The Sword in the Stone between its first publication in 1938 and subsequent appearance as the first part of the Once and Future King in 1958. These changes are related to the immediate historical context of World War II, and also to the wider context of children's literature dealing with the relationship between the child and the ''natural world''. Rather than seeing White's texts as reflecting a post-Enlightenment idealisation, placing both child and nature beyond the bounds of culture and human limitation, the essay argues that even in the first version White's medieval worldview is constructed from a sophisticated and deliberately anachronistic medley of discourses including medieval codes of hunting and chivalry, Renaissance tragedy and Victorian natural history. These combine to create an exclusively male world, which is analysed as part of the ideological construction of a masculine relationship to the environment based on a ''natural'' nstinct to hunt and kill. White's growing pacifism leads to the insertion in the later version of episodes replacing this relationship with models of cooperative animal behaviour, and even introducing a female mentor for the hero.

scholarly journals A botanical demonstration of the potential of linking data using unique identifiers for people

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (12) ◽  
pp. e0261130
Author(s):  
Anton Güntsch ◽  
Quentin Groom ◽  
Marcus Ernst ◽  
Jörg Holetschek ◽  
Andreas Plank ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Pilot Study ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Index System ◽  
External Resources ◽  
Central Index ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
Collection Data ◽  
The Web

Natural history collection data available digitally on the web have so far only made limited use of the potential of semantic links among themselves and with cross-disciplinary resources. In a pilot study, botanical collections of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) have therefore begun to semantically annotate their collection data, starting with data on people, and to link them via a central index system. As a result, it is now possible to query data on collectors across different collections and automatically link them to a variety of external resources. The system is being continuously developed and is already in production use in an international collection portal.

scholarly journals Visualizing natural history collection data provides insight into collection development and bias

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vaughn Shirey
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Aggregated Data ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
Drexel University ◽  
Collection Data ◽  
Spatial Domains ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Insight Into

Natural history collections contain estimated billions of records representing a large body of knowledge about the diversity and distribution of life on Earth. Assessments of various forms of bias within the aggregated data associated with specimens in these collections have been conducted across temporal, taxonomic, and spatial domains. Considering that these biases are the sum of biases across all contributing collections to aggregate datasets, the assessment of bias at the collection level is warranted. Interactive visualization provides a powerful tool for the assessment of these biases and insight into the historical development of natural history collections, providing context for where sources of bias may originate and developing historical narratives to clarify our understanding of our own knowledge about life on Earth. Here, I present a case study on using Sankey diagrams to illustrate the development of the entomology type collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with the hope that extensions of these practices among individual natural history collections are modified and adopted.

scholarly journals “Attractive to Strangers and Instructive to Students.” The McCullochs’ 19th Century Bird Collection in Dalhousie College

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-108
Author(s):  
Eric L. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Hybrid Origin ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Great Caution ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Thomas Mcculloch

Thomas McCulloch, Presbyterian minister and educator, founder of Pictou Academy, first President of Dalhousie College 1838-1843, established a museum in Pictou, NS, by 1828, including a bird collection. To McCulloch, the order of the natural world instilled in students principles of a liberal education and a model of society. His first collections were sold, but when McCulloch came to Dalhousie in 1838 he started a new collection, hoping to make it the basis of a provincial museum. In this he was aided by his son Thomas, who had been trained as a taxidermist. The younger McCulloch kept and expanded the collection until his death, after which it passed to Dalhousie College. The current McCulloch Collection, mainly the work of Thomas McCulloch junior, seems to exemplify purposes and practices of 19th century natural history. But research shows that the collection has a hybrid origin and must be viewed with great caution as an historical artifact. This is a case study in the difficulty of interpreting 19th century natural history collections without careful examination of their history.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document