scholarly journals Rapid Creation of a Data Product for the World's Specimens of Horseshoe Bats and Relatives, a Known Reservoir for Coronaviruses

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Krimmel ◽  
Austin Mast ◽  
Deborah Paul ◽  
Robert Bruhn ◽  
Nelson Rios ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Reproducible Research ◽  
State University ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Data Product ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Horseshoe Bats

Genomic evidence suggests that the causative virus of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) was introduced to humans from horseshoe bats (family Rhinolophidae) (Andersen et al. 2020) and that species in this family as well as in the closely related Hipposideridae and Rhinonycteridae families are reservoirs of several SARS-like coronaviruses (Gouilh et al. 2011). Specimens collected over the past 400 years and curated by natural history collections around the world provide an essential reference as we work to understand the distributions, life histories, and evolutionary relationships of these bats and their viruses. While the importance of biodiversity specimens to emerging infectious disease research is clear, empowering disease researchers with specimen data is a relatively new goal for the collections community (DiEuliis et al. 2016). Recognizing this, a team from Florida State University is collaborating with partners at GEOLocate, Bionomia, University of Florida, the American Museum of Natural History, and Arizona State University to produce a deduplicated, georeferenced, vetted, and versioned data product of the world's specimens of horseshoe bats and relatives for researchers studying COVID-19. The project will serve as a model for future rapid data product deployments about biodiversity specimens. The project underscores the value of biodiversity data aggregators iDigBio and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which are sources for 58,617 and 79,862 records, respectively, as of July 2020, of horseshoe bat and relative specimens held by over one hundred natural history collections. Although much of the specimen-based biodiversity data served by iDigBio and GBIF is high quality, it can be considered raw data and therefore often requires additional wrangling, standardizing, and enhancement to be fit for specific applications. The project will create efficiencies for the coronavirus research community by producing an enhanced, research-ready data product, which will be versioned and published through Zenodo, an open-access repository (see doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3974999). In this talk, we highlight lessons learned from the initial phases of the project, including deduplicating specimen records, standardizing country information, and enhancing taxonomic information. We also report on our progress to date, related to enhancing information about agents (e.g., collectors or determiners) associated with these specimens, and to georeferencing specimen localities. We seek also to explore how much we can use the added agent information (i.e., ORCID iDs and Wikidata Q identifiers) to inform our georeferencing efforts and to support crediting those collecting and doing identifications. The project will georeference approximately one third of our specimen records, based on those lacking geospatial coordinates but containing textual locality descriptions. We furthermore provide an overview of our holistic approach to enhancing specimen records, which we hope will maximize the value of the bat specimens at the center of what has been recently termed the "extended specimen network" (Lendemer et al. 2020). The centrality of the physical specimen in the network reinforces the importance of archived materials for reproducible research. Recognizing this, we view the collections providing data to iDigBio and GBIF as essential partners, as we expect that they will be responsible for the long-term management of enhanced data associated with the physical specimens they curate. We hope that this project can provide a model for better facilitating the reintegration of enhanced data back into local specimen data management systems.

scholarly journals Engaging K-12 Audiences with Biodiversity Data through Advancing Digitization for Biodiversity Collections

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e26473
Author(s):  
Molly Phillips ◽  
Anne Basham ◽  
Marc Cubeta ◽  
Kari Harris ◽  
Jonathan Hendricks ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Science Standards ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Digital Collections ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
K 12

Natural history collections around the world are currently being digitized with the resulting data and associated media now shared online in aggregators such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio). These collections and their resources are accessible and discoverable through online portals to not only researchers and collections professionals, but to educators, students, and other potential downstream users. Primary and secondary education (K-12) in the United States is going through its own revolution with many states adopting Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS https://www.nextgenscience.org/). The new standards emphasize science practices for analyzing and interpreting data and connect to cross-cutting concepts such as cause and effect and patterns. NGSS and natural history collections data portals seem to complement each other. Nevertheless, many educators and students are unaware of the digital resources available or are overwhelmed with working in aggregated databases created by scientists. To better address this challenge, participants within the National Science Foundation Advancing Digitization for Biodiversity Collections program (ADBC) have been working to increase awareness of, and scaffold learning for, digitized collections with K-12 educators and learners. They are accomplishing this through individual programs at institutions across the country as part of the Thematic Collections Networks and collaboratively through the iDigBio Education and Outreach Working Group. ADBC partners have focused on incorporating digital data and resources into K-12 classrooms through training workshops and webinars for both educators and collections professionals, as well as through creating educational resources, websites, and applications that use digital collections data. This presentation includes lessons learned from engaging K-12 audiences with digital data, summarizes available resources for both educators and collections professionals, shares how to become involved, and provides ways to facilitate transfer of educational resources to the K-12 community.

scholarly journals Closing Gaps But Increasing Bias In North American Butterfly Inventory Completeness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vaughn Shirey ◽  
Michael W. Belitz ◽  
Vijay Barve ◽  
Robert Guralnick
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Museum Specimens ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Human Footprint ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Global Change Research ◽  
Under Sampling ◽  
Community Science

AbstractAggregate biodiversity data from museum specimens and community observations have promise for macroscale ecological analyses. Despite this, many groups are under-sampled, and sampling is not homogeneous across space. Here we used butterflies, the best documented group of insects, to examine inventory completeness across North America. We separated digitally accessible butterfly records into those from natural history collections and burgeoning community science observations to determine if these data sources have differential spatio-taxonomic biases. When we combined all data, we found startling under-sampling in regions with the most dramatic trajectories of climate change and across biomes. We also found support for the hypothesis that community science observations are filling more gaps in sampling but are more biased towards areas with the highest human footprint. Finally, we found that both types of occurrences have familial-level taxonomic completeness biases, in contrast to the hypothesis of less taxonomic bias in natural history collections data. These results suggest that higher inventory completeness, driven by rapid growth of community science observations, is partially offset by higher spatio-taxonomic biases. We use the findings here to provide recommendations on how to alleviate some of these gaps in the context of prioritizing global change research.

scholarly journals Quantifying Institutional Reach Through the Human Network in Natural History Collections

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Shorthouse ◽  
Roderic Page
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Professional Relationships ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Closed Loops ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Darwin Core ◽  
International Audience ◽  
The Impact ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Formal Recognition

Through the Bloodhound proof-of-concept, https://bloodhound-tracker.net an international audience of collectors and determiners of natural history specimens are engaged in the emotive act of claiming their specimens and attributing other specimens to living and deceased mentors and colleagues. Behind the scenes, these claims build links between Open Researcher and Contributor Identifiers (ORCID, https://orcid.org) or Wikidata identifiers for people and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) specimen identifiers, predicated by the Darwin Core terms, recordedBy (collected) and identifiedBy (determined). Here we additionally describe the socio-technical challenge in unequivocally resolving people names in legacy specimen data and propose lightweight and reusable solutions. The unique identifiers for the affiliations of active researchers are obtained from ORCID whereas the unique identifiers for institutions where specimens are actively curated are resolved through Wikidata. By constructing closed loops of links between person, specimen, and institution, an interesting suite of potential metrics emerges, all due to the activities of employees and their network of professional relationships. This approach balances a desire for individuals to receive formal recognition for their efforts in natural history collections with that of an institutional-level need to alter budgets in response to easily obtained numeric trends in national and international reach. If handled in a coordinating fashion, this reporting technique may be a significant new driver for specimen digitization efforts on par with Altmetric, https://www.altmetric.com, an important new tool that tracks the impact of publications and delights administrators and authors alike.

scholarly journals The history and impact of digitization and digital data mobilization on biodiversity research

2018 ◽  
Vol 374 (1763) ◽  
pp. 20170391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gil Nelson ◽  
Shari Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
National Commission ◽  
Rapid Rise ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Scientific Enterprise ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Biodiversity Research

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a rapid rise in the mobilization of digital biodiversity data. This has thrust natural history museums into the forefront of biodiversity research, underscoring their central role in the modern scientific enterprise. The advent of mobilization initiatives such as the United States National Science Foundation's Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC), Australia's Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Mexico's National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Brazil's Centro de Referência em Informação (CRIA) and China's National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII) has led to a rapid rise in data aggregators and an exponential increase in digital data for scientific research and arguably provide the best evidence of where species live. The international Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) now serves about 131 million museum specimen records, and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) in the USA has amassed more than 115 million. These resources expose collections to a wider audience of researchers, provide the best biodiversity data in the modern era outside of nature itself and ensure the primacy of specimen-based research. Here, we provide a brief history of worldwide data mobilization, their impact on biodiversity research, challenges for ensuring data quality, their contribution to scientific publications and evidence of the rising profiles of natural history collections. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene’.

scholarly journals Unlocking the Entomological Collection of the Natural History Museum of Maputo, Mozambique

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Domingos Sandramo ◽  
Enrico Nicosia ◽  
Silvio Cianciullo ◽  
Bernardo Muatinte ◽  
Almeida Guissamulo
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Development Programme ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Data Portal ◽  
Global Biodiversity ◽  
Biodiversity Information

The collections of the Natural History Museum of Maputo have a crucial role in the safeguarding of Mozambique's biodiversity, representing an important repository of data and materials regarding the natural heritage of the country. In this paper, a dataset is described, based on the Museum’s Entomological Collection recording 409 species belonging to seven orders and 48 families. Each specimen’s available data, such as geographical coordinates and taxonomic information, have been digitised to build the dataset. The specimens included in the dataset were obtained between 1914–2018 by collectors and researchers from the Natural History Museum of Maputo (once known as “Museu Alváro de Castro”) in all the country’s provinces, with the exception of Cabo Delgado Province. This paper adds data to the Biodiversity Network of Mozambique and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, within the objectives of the SECOSUD II Project and the Biodiversity Information for Development Programme. The aforementioned insect dataset is available on the GBIF Engine data portal (https://doi.org/10.15468/j8ikhb). Data were also shared on the Mozambican national portal of biodiversity data BioNoMo (https://bionomo.openscidata.org), developed by SECOSUD II Project.

scholarly journals Unleash the Potential of your Website! 180,000 webpages from the French Natural History Museum marked up with Bioschemas/Schema.org biodiversity types

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franck Michel ◽  
Gargominy Olivier ◽  
Benjamin Ledentec ◽  
The Bioschemas Community
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Integrative Approach ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Major Step ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility

The challenge of finding, retrieving and making sense of biodiversity data is being tackled by many different approaches. Projects like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) or Encyclopedia of Life (EoL) adopt an integrative approach where they republish, in a uniform manner, records aggregated from multiple data sources. With this centralized, siloed approach, such projects stand as powerful one-stop shops, but tend to reduce the visibility of other data sources that are not (yet) aggregated. At the other end of the spectrum, the Web of Data promotes the building of a global, distributed knowledge graph consisting of datasets published by independent institutions according to the Linked Open Data principles (Heath and Bizer 2011), such as Wikidata or DBpedia. Beyond these "sophisticated" infrastructures, websites remain the most common way of publishing and sharing scientific data at low cost. Thanks to web search engines, everyone can discover webpages. Yet, the summaries provided in results lists are often insufficiently informative to decide whether a web page is relevant with respect to some research interests, such that integrating data published by a wealth of websites is hardly possible. A strategy around this issue lies in annotating websites with structured, semantic metadata such as the Schema.org vocabulary (Guha et al. 2015). Webpages typically embed Schema.org annotations in the form of markup data (written in the RDFa or JSON-LD formats), which search engines harvest and exploit to improve ranking and provide more informative summarization. Bioschemas is a community effort working to extend Schema.org to support markup for Life Sciences websites (Michel and The Bioschemas Community 2018, Garcia et al. 2017). Bioschemas primarily re-uses existing terms from Schema.org, occasionally re-uses terms from third-party vocabularies, and when necessary proposes new terms to be endorsed by Schema.org. As of today, Bioschemas's biodiversity group has proposed the Taxon type*1 to support the annotation of any webpage denoting taxa, TaxonName to support more specifically the annotation of taxonomic names registries, and guidelines describing how to leverage existing vocabularies such as Darwin Core terms. To proceed further, the biodiversity community must now demonstrate its interest in having these terms endorsed by Schema.org: (1) through a critical mass of live markup deployments, and (2) by the development of applications capable of exploiting this markup data. Therefore, as a first step, the French National Museum of Natural History has marked up its natural heritage inventory website: over 180,000 webpages describing the species inventoried in French territories have been annotated with the Taxon and TaxonName types in the form of JSON-LD scripts (see example scripts). As an example, one can check the source of the Delphinus delphis page. In this presentation, by demonstrating that marking up existing webpages can be very inexpensive, we wish to encourage the biodiversity community to adopt this practice, engage in the discussion about biodiversity-related markup, and possibly propose new terms related e.g. to traits or collections. We believe that generalizing the use of such markup by the many websites reporting checklists, museum collections, occurrences, life traits etc. shall be a major step towards the generalized adoption of FAIR*2 principles (Wilkinson 2016), shall dramatically improve information discovery using search engines, and shall be a key accelerator for the development of novel, web-scale, biodiversity data integration scenarios.

scholarly journals Assessment of North American arthropod collections: prospects and challenges for addressing biodiversity research

PeerJ ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e8086 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil S. Cobb ◽  
Lawrence F. Gall ◽  
Jennifer M. Zaspel ◽  
Nicolas J. Dowdy ◽  
Lindsie M. McCabe ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Natural History ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Biodiversity Crisis ◽  
Biodiversity Research ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Rate Of Increase ◽  
Crucial Information

Over 300 million arthropod specimens are housed in North American natural history collections. These collections represent a “vast hidden treasure trove” of biodiversity −95% of the specimen label data have yet to be transcribed for research, and less than 2% of the specimens have been imaged. Specimen labels contain crucial information to determine species distributions over time and are essential for understanding patterns of ecology and evolution, which will help assess the growing biodiversity crisis driven by global change impacts. Specimen images offer indispensable insight and data for analyses of traits, and ecological and phylogenetic patterns of biodiversity. Here, we review North American arthropod collections using two key metrics, specimen holdings and digitization efforts, to assess the potential for collections to provide needed biodiversity data. We include data from 223 arthropod collections in North America, with an emphasis on the United States. Our specific findings are as follows: (1) The majority of North American natural history collections (88%) and specimens (89%) are located in the United States. Canada has comparable holdings to the United States relative to its estimated biodiversity. Mexico has made the furthest progress in terms of digitization, but its specimen holdings should be increased to reflect the estimated higher Mexican arthropod diversity. The proportion of North American collections that has been digitized, and the number of digital records available per species, are both much lower for arthropods when compared to chordates and plants. (2) The National Science Foundation’s decade-long ADBC program (Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections) has been transformational in promoting arthropod digitization. However, even if this program became permanent, at current rates, by the year 2050 only 38% of the existing arthropod specimens would be digitized, and less than 1% would have associated digital images. (3) The number of specimens in collections has increased by approximately 1% per year over the past 30 years. We propose that this rate of increase is insufficient to provide enough data to address biodiversity research needs, and that arthropod collections should aim to triple their rate of new specimen acquisition. (4) The collections we surveyed in the United States vary broadly in a number of indicators. Collectively, there is depth and breadth, with smaller collections providing regional depth and larger collections providing greater global coverage. (5) Increased coordination across museums is needed for digitization efforts to target taxa for research and conservation goals and address long-term data needs. Two key recommendations emerge: collections should significantly increase both their specimen holdings and their digitization efforts to empower continental and global biodiversity data pipelines, and stimulate downstream research.

scholarly journals Workforce Capacity Development and the Digital Extended Specimen

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Monfils ◽  
Elizabeth R. Ellwood
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Capacity Development ◽  
Workforce Training ◽  
Educational Materials ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Workforce Capacity ◽  
Future Work ◽  
And Training

As we look to the future of natural history collections and a global integration of biodiversity data, we are reliant on a diverse workforce with the skills necessary to build, grow, and support the data, tools, and resources of the Digital Extended Specimen (DES; Webster 2019, Lendemer et al. 2020, Hardisty 2020). Future “DES Data Curators” – those who will be charged with maintaining resources created through the DES – will require skills and resources beyond what is currently available to most natural history collections staff. In training the workforce to support the DES we have an opportunity to broaden our community and ensure that, through the expansion of biodiversity data, the workforce landscape itself is diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible. A fully-implemented DES will provide training that encapsulates capacity building, skills development, unifying protocols and best practices guidance, and cutting-edge technology that also creates inclusive, equitable, and accessible systems, workflows, and communities. As members of the biodiversity community and the current workforce, we can leverage our knowledge and skills to develop innovative training models that: include a range of educational settings and modalities; address the needs of new communities not currently engaged with digital data; from their onset, provide attribution for past and future work and do not perpetuate the legacy of colonial practices and historic inequalities found in many physical natural history collections. Recent reports from the Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN 2019) and the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2020) specifically address workforce needs in support of the DES. To address workforce training and inclusivity within the context of global data integration, the Alliance for Biodiversity Knowledge included a topic on Workforce capacity development and inclusivity in Phase 2 of the consultation on Converging Digital Specimens and Extended Specimens - Towards a global specification for data integration. Across these efforts, several common themes have emerged relative to workforce training and the DES. A call for a community needs assessment: As a community, we have several unknowns related to the current collections workforce and training needs. We would benefit from a baseline assessment of collections professionals to define current job responsibilities, demographics, education and training, incentives, compensation, and benefits. This includes an evaluation of current employment prospects and opportunities. Defined skills and training for the 21st century collections professional: We need to be proactive and define the 21st century workforce skills necessary to support the development and implementation of the DES. When we define the skills and content needs we can create appropriate training opportunities that include scalable materials for capacity building, educational materials that develop relevant skills, unifying protocols across the DES network, and best practices guidance for professionals. Training for data end-users: We need to train data end-users in biodiversity and data science at all levels of formal and informal education from primary and secondary education through the existing workforce. This includes developing training and educational materials, creating data portals, and building analyses that are inclusive, accessible, and engage the appropriate community of science educators, data scientists, and biodiversity researchers. Foster a diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible and professional workforce: As the DES develops and new tools and resources emerge, we need to be intentional in our commitment to building tools that are accessible and in assuring that access is equitable. This includes establishing best practices to ensure the community providing and accessing data is inclusive and representative of the diverse global community of potential data providers and users. Upfront, we must acknowledge and address issues of historic inequalities and colonial practices and provide appropriate attribution for past and future work while ensuring legal and regulatory compliance. Efforts must include creating transparent linkages among data and the humans that create the data that drives the DES. In this presentation, we will highlight recommendations for building workforce capacity within the DES that are diverse, inclusive, equitable and accessible, take into account the requirements of the biodiversity science community, and that are flexible to meet the needs of an evolving field.

scholarly journals Uncertain Geo-Uncertainty: Ecological research and public biodiversity data repositories

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnald Marcer ◽  
Elspeth Haston ◽  
Quentin Groom ◽  
F. Xavier Picó ◽  
Agustí Escobar ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Species Distribution Modelling ◽  
Location Information ◽  
Ecological Research ◽  
Biodiversity Data ◽  
Data Repositories ◽  
Ecological Requirements ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Wide Range

Natural history collections represent a vast and superb wealth of information gathered and curated across centuries by institutions such as natural history museums and botanical gardens around the world. The relatively recent advent and maturation of accessible computer technology has allowed the initiation of major digitization projects aimed at making the contents of these collections publicly available for education and research purposes. The final destinations of these newly digitized data are public biodiversity data repositories, of which, GBIF is the main one. These respositories are gateways where researchers can access and retrieve the data for use in a wide range of analyses. This unprecedented volume of information on biodiversity represents an extraordinary asset for research in ecology and evolution. A particularly important part of the digitized data for any given specimen is its collection location, as it indirectly gives information on the species’ habitat and thus, its ecological requirements. Many specimens in natural history collections come from a time where the collecting event, which includes the location information, was hand-written on physical tags attached to the specimen. This location information was given as a description of a place, e.g. a site name, and could be a rather precise or vague description. In order to convert this description of locality into a digitized research-grade georeferenced record, the research community has come up with a set of guidelines and recommendations; the most prominent one the point-radius method devised by Wieczorek et al. in 2004. However, and despite the public availability of this know-how, the end result is that the data available at the end of the pipeline, e.g. GBIF, often lacks georeferencing information with enough quality to be used for research purposes. Occurrence records from natural history collection datasets held at GBIF, often lack spatial coordinates and, if present, in most cases their precision and uncertainty fields are blank. The final consequence of this lack of complete georeferencing information is that the affected records are rendered useless for many kinds of research. For example, the flourishing field of species distribution modelling absolutely depends on accurate spatial information in order to be able to retrieve information on the environmental conditions in which the species live. The availability of global environmental and remote sensing datasets together with the sophisticated geospatial tools at the disposal of the researcher become powerless if no quality geoinformation is available. In this study, we perform a preliminary analysis on the status and availability of geoferencing information in datasets originated from specimens in natural history collections held at GBIF, discuss how the quality of this spatial info may affect ecological research, and conclude with some recommendations on how to better describe the georeferencing process within public digital biodiversity repositories.

scholarly journals Digitizing Primary Data on Biodiversity to Protect Natural History Collections Against Catastrophic Events: The type material of dragonflies (Insecta: Odonata) from Museu Nacional of Brazil

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus De Almeida ◽  
Ângelo Pinto ◽  
Alcimar Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Type Material ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Catastrophic Events ◽  
Type Specimens ◽  
Global Biodiversity Information Facility ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
The Impact

Natural history collections (NHC) are guardians of biodiversity (Lane 1996) and essential to understand the natural world and its evolutionary processes. They hold samples of morphological and genetic heritages of living and extinct biotas, helping to reconstruct the timeline of life over the centuries (Gardner 2014). Primary data from specimens in NHC are crucial elements for research in many areas of biological sciences, considered the “bricks” of systematics and therefore one of the pillars for evolutionary studies (Troudet 2018). For this reason, studies carried out in NHC are essential for the development of the scientific knowledge and are pivotal for the scientific-technological progress of a nation (Camargo 2015). The digitization and availability of primary data on biodiversity from NHC represents a inexpensive, practical and secure means of exchanging information, allowing collaboration between institutions and researchers. In this sense, initiatives such as the Sistema de Informação sobre a Biodiversidade Brasileira (SiBBr), a country-level branch of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) platform, aim to encourage and establish ways for the informatization of biological collections and their type specimens. Known for housing one of the largest and oldest collections of insects in the world focused on Neotropical fauna, the Entomological Collection of the Museu Nacional of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (MNRJ) had more than 3,000 primary types and approximately 12,005,000 specimens, of which about 96% were lost in the tragic fire occurred at the institution on September 2, 2018. The SiBBr project was active in that collection from 2016 to 2019 and enabled the digitization and preservation of data from the type material of many insect orders, including the charismatic dragonflies (order Odonata). Due to the end of the agreement between SiBBr and the Museu Nacional, most of the obtained primary data are pending full curation and, therefore, are not yet available to the public and researchers. The MNRJ housed the biggest and most important collection of dragonflies among all Central and South American institutions. It assembled most of the physical records of neotropical dragonfly fauna gathered over the last 80 years, many of which are of undescribed taxa. Unfortunately, almost all material was permanently lost. This study aims to gather, analyze and publicize primary data of the type material of dragonflies housed in the MNRJ, ensuring the preservation of its history, as well as providing data on the taxonomy and diversity of this marvelous group of insects. A total of 11 families, 50 genera and 131 species were recorded, belonging to the suborders Anisoptera and Zygoptera with distributional records widespread in South America. The MNRJ housed 105 holotypes of dragonflies' nomina representing 11.7% of the richness of the Brazilian Odonata fauna (901 spp.), a country with the highest number of species of the biosphere. The impact of the loss of this collection to studies of these insects is unprecedented, since some enigmatic and monotypic genera such as Brasiliogomphus, Fluminagrion and Roppaneura lost 100% of their type series, while others most diverse such as Lauromacromia, Oxyagrion and Neocordulia lost 50%, 35% and 31% of their holotypes. Therefore, due to the registration and preservation of primary biodiversity data, this work reiterates the importance of curating and digitizing biological scientific collections. Furthermore, it shows extreme relevance for preserving information on existing biodiversity permanently and providing support for future research. Digitization and interconnecting digital extended specimen data proves to be one of the main and most effective ways to protect NHC heritage and their primary data against catastrophic events.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document