scholarly journals Forgotten treasures: the fate of data in animal behavior studies

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S Caetano ◽  
Anita Aisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Behavioral Ecology ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Museum Specimens ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
Ecological Data ◽  
Data Archiving ◽  
Data Stewardship ◽  
Key Aspects

Published discussions on data stewardship often focus on standardized datasets whose reuse patterns are known. Improvements in stewardship of animal behavior data are virtually absent and lag behind other disciplines such as molecular biology and systematics. In this essay, we discuss best practices of three key aspects related to the collection and archival of behavioral data: data supporting published results; data collected from field observations; and the potential of museum specimens as source of data to animal behavior and ecology. To quantify how much data is shared in publications we reviewed selected journals in animal behavior and behavioral ecology. We found that only an extremely small proportion of the articles published in 2013 made even part of their data available. We discuss about the benefits of making data available, review resources available for data archiving and provide practical guidance for ethologists. We discuss and provide examples of the amount of ethological and ecological data that can be recorded during field observations. To investigate the potential of museum specimens as source of data, we surveyed researchers working in areas related to ecology, animal behavior, and systematics. Both ethologists and systematists agreed that natural history information stored in collections would be a valuable source of data. We make recommendations to enhance data collection and stewardship from the point of view of researchers in animal behavior sciences, considering the special characteristics of the discipline and the type of data that is often produced. We suggest that there is a large amount of crucial data about natural history, ecology and behavior that investigators could glean from collections. Although it is difficult to appreciate the relevance of data for future studies at the time of publication, such data may inspire fruitful opportunities that we cannot afford to lose.

scholarly journals Forgotten treasures: the fate of data in animal behavior studies

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S Caetano ◽  
Anita Aisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Behavioral Ecology ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Museum Specimens ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
Ecological Data ◽  
Data Archiving ◽  
Data Stewardship ◽  
Key Aspects

Published discussions on data stewardship often focus on standardized datasets whose reuse patterns are known. Improvements in stewardship of animal behavior data are virtually absent and lag behind other disciplines such as molecular biology and systematics. In this essay, we discuss best practices of three key aspects related to the collection and archival of behavioral data: data supporting published results; data collected from field observations; and the potential of museum specimens as source of data to animal behavior and ecology. To quantify how much data is shared in publications we reviewed selected journals in animal behavior and behavioral ecology. We found that only an extremely small proportion of the articles published in 2013 made even part of their data available. We discuss about the benefits of making data available, review resources available for data archiving and provide practical guidance for ethologists. We discuss and provide examples of the amount of ethological and ecological data that can be recorded during field observations. To investigate the potential of museum specimens as source of data, we surveyed researchers working in areas related to ecology, animal behavior, and systematics. Both ethologists and systematists agreed that natural history information stored in collections would be a valuable source of data. We make recommendations to enhance data collection and stewardship from the point of view of researchers in animal behavior sciences, considering the special characteristics of the discipline and the type of data that is often produced. We suggest that there is a large amount of crucial data about natural history, ecology and behavior that investigators could glean from collections. Although it is difficult to appreciate the relevance of data for future studies at the time of publication, such data may inspire fruitful opportunities that we cannot afford to lose.

First description of the male of the linyphiid spider Disembolus  corneliae (Chamberlin & Ivie, 1944) (Araneae, Linyphiidae)

Zootaxa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4526 (3) ◽  
pp. 393
Author(s):  
MARC A. MILNE
Keyword(s):  
New Species ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Museum Specimens ◽  
American Museum ◽  
First Time

The erigonine linyphiid genus Disembolus currently contains 24 described species (World Spider Catalog 2018). Disembolus was erected by Chamberlin and Ivie (1933) to accommodate their new species D. stridulans Chamberlin and Ivie from Utah. Since then, 23 species have been added to the genus. Chamberlin (1949) described D. zygethus Chamberlin, but the majority of species were added to the genus by Millidge (1981). Millidge (1981) described 16 species from museum specimens at the American Museum of Natural History and transferred five species from the genera Tapinocyba and Soudinus (D. alpha (Chamberlin 1949), D. kesimbus (Chamberlin 1949), D. phanus (Chamberlin 1949), D. sacerdotalis (Crosby & Bishop 1933), and D. corneliae (Chamberlin & Ivie 1944)). The last species added to the genus was D. bairdi Edwards described by Edwards in 1999. Disembolus corneliae Chamberlin and Ivie was described from the female only by Chamberlin and Ivie (1944) as Soudinus corneliae. The species was then transferred to Disembolus by Millidge (1981). Herein, I describe the male of the species for the first time. 

scholarly journals SwissCollNet – A National Initiative for Natural History Collections in Switzerland

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Frick ◽  
Pia Stieger ◽  
Christoph Scheidegger
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Data Archiving ◽  
Data Infrastructure ◽  
Botanical Gardens ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
Common Strategy ◽  
National Initiative ◽  
Educational Potential ◽  
Term Data

More than 60 million specimens are housed in geological and biological collections in numerous museums and botanical gardens located all over Switzerland. They are of national and international origin. Taken together they form an entity with a high scientific value and international recognition for their contribution to scientific research. Due to the federalistic organisation of Switzerland, natural history collections are located and curated in numerous institutions. So far, no common strategy for digitisation, documentation and long-term data archiving has been developed. This shortcoming has been widely identified by concerned parties. Under the lead of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, several organisations have assembled information about Swiss natural history collections. They identified measures to be taken to promote the scientific and educational potential of natural history collections in Switzerland (Beer et al. 2019). With a national initiative, the Swiss Natural History Collections Network (SwissCollNet) aims to unite Swiss natural history collections under a common vision and with a common strategy. The goal is to promote the collections themselves and to harness the scientific and educational potential of these collections for research and training. SwissCollNet consists of representatives of research, teaching, museums and botanical gardens, the data centers for information on the national fauna and flora, the Swiss Systematics Society and the Swiss node of GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The initiative aims to foster research on natural history collections. It will provide a single decentralised data infrastructure framework for Swiss research related to natural history. It will help to harmonise nationwide collection data management, digitisation and long-term data archiving. It will facilitate identification of specimens and revision of taxonomic groups. New research techniques, fast-evolving computer technologies and internet connectivity, create new opportunities for deciphering and using the wealth of information housed in Swiss and international collections. The development of an agreed strategy and research priorities on a national scale will allow fluent, fluid and permanent collaboration across all Swiss natural history collections by promoting interoperability and unified access to collections as well as creating opportunities for scientific collaboration and innovation. This national approach will create an internationally compatible research data infrastructure, while respecting and integrating regional and decentralized conditions and requirements. Thus, it will maximize the impact for science, policy and society.

scholarly journals A 21st Century Vision for Neotropical Snake Systematics

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Robert Alexander Pyron
Keyword(s):  
Species Richness ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Global Change ◽  
South America ◽  
Ecosystem Function ◽  
Museum Specimens ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Recent Synthesis

We live in an unprecedented age for systematics and biodiversity studies. Ongoing global change is leading to a future with reduced species richness and ecosystem function (Pereira, Navarro, & Martins, 2012). Yet, we know more about biodiversity now than at any time in the past. For squamates in particular, we have range maps for all species (Roll et al., 2017), phylogenies containing estimates for all species (Tonini, Beard, Ferreira, Jetz, & Pyron, 2016), and myriad ecological and natural-history datasets for a large percentage of species (Meiri et al., 2013; Mesquita et al., 2016). For neotropical snakes, a recent synthesis of museum specimens and verified localities offers a fine-grained perspective on their ecogeographic distribution in Central and South America, and the Caribbean (Guedes et al., 2018).

scholarly journals Accommodating travellers with pets

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-11
Author(s):  
Yiqi Chen ◽  
Heike Schänzel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Online Reviews ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Market Expansion ◽  
Pet Owners ◽  
Public Areas ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
Consumer Perspective ◽  
Key Aspects

New Zealand is considered a nation of pet lovers, with 64 percent of households owning at least one pet [1]. The aim of this study [2] was to explore what the main considerations were for hospitality operators in Auckland with regards to offering pet-friendly services. To answer this question, several key aspects were considered: pet tourism trends; market expansion of pet-friendly accommodations; the profitability of allowing pets; and operational implications, such as additional investment and labour costs. This explorative research interviewed ten accommodation providers in Auckland: five pet-friendly and five non-pet-friendly. These operators represented owners or managers of hotels, motels, lodges and apartments spread across Auckland and Waiheke Island. Research on operators’ perspectives on pet tourism is unexplored, with previous literature focusing on tourists’ perceptions [3–5]. This study hopes to provide practical implications for the industry, especially for the New Zealand context. New Zealand’s pet tourism market is considered small and mainly domestic. According to popular global dog travel directory Bring Fido [6], in 2017 there were a mere fifteen pet-friendly accommodations in Auckland, in stark contrast to other cities such as New York (367), London (96) and Paris (643). Interviewees’ opinions on the profitability of accommodating pet tourists varied. Non-pet operators rejected the idea of allowing pets due to an abundance of non-pet customers and were reluctant to accept perceived pet-related risks. Their pre-conceptions were likely formed by operating in silos without conducting any research on pet tourism and its market landscape. There was a genuine fear of negative online reviews which cannot be easily amended and can have significant longevity. Their key perceived risks were related to hygiene and allergy concerns for other customers. Preventative measures were believed to involve significant investment into property renovation. Pet friendly operators, who mainly accommodated dogs, shared a different perspective through their own experiences. They expressed high trust and optimism for pet tourists and had rarely experienced any major pet-related incidents. From a hygiene and allergy point of view, the risks were considered minimal and customers bore the responsibility when stating their allergies. Pet-friendly operators stated that no additional workload or costs were incurred through accommodating pets. Significant renovations were not deemed necessary, instead relying on what they already had. However, in the unlikely event of a major pet-related incident, the interviewees expressed that their trust towards accommodating pets would waver, meaning their tolerance of risk was  not resilient. At the time of the research, pet-friendly operators were relaxed about pet policies and had not formalised them. The majority were conveying rules to pet tourists through word of mouth, such as that pets must be on a leash in public areas, instead of through written and signed agreements. Tellingly, pet-friendly operators did not perceive New Zealand’s pet tourism market as lucrative. They were allowing pets as an extension of service and lacked motivation to expand or to cater for more pets. The study highlights the potential for growth in the domestic pet tourism market despite the current stalemate, where those who allowed pets were supportive and vice versa. Improving this situation might require unified pet-friendly associations and certain levels of government intervention. In parallel, all operators should break out of silos and socialise more with their pet-friendly peers to gain knowledge and validate assumptions. Pet-friendly operators could improve engagement with pet tourists through standardised policies and formal agreements. With guidance and support from their peers, more accommodations may be capable of handling pets. Pet owners could look forward to a day when travelling with pets becomes much more accessible due to abundant pet-friendly accommodation. Corresponding author Heike Schänzel can be contacted at: [email protected] References (1) New Zealand Petfood Manufacturers Association Homepage. https://www.petfoodnz.co.nz/ (accessed Aug 13, 2017). (2) Chen, Y. Accommodating Travellers with Pets: Is Auckland Ready? Master’s Thesis, Auckland University of Technology, July 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10292/11867 (accessed 19 June 2019). (3) Chen, A. H.; Peng, N.; Hung, K. Developing a Pet Owners' Tourism Constraints Scale – the Constraints to Take Dogs to Tourism Activities. International Journal of Tourism Research 2014, 16 (4), 315–324. https://doi.org/10.1002/jtr.1959 (4) Kirillova, K.; Lee, S.; Lehto, X. Willingness to Travel with Pets: A U.S. Consumer Perspective. Journal of Quality Assurance in Hospitality & Tourism 2015, 16 (1), 24–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1528008X.2015.966296 (5) Zhang, Y. People's Attitudes towards Dogs in Hotel Settings. Master’s thesis, Purdue University, May 2012. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1242132630 (accessed 19 June 2019). (6) Bring Fido Homepage. https://www.bringfido.com/ (accessed Aug 13, 2017).

scholarly journals Making Education Collections Safe to Touch: Safety Assessments and Data Maintenance

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. e28197
Author(s):  
Kelsey Falquero ◽  
Katherine Roberts ◽  
Jessica Nakano
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Specimen Preparation ◽  
Museum Specimens ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Storage Space ◽  
Collections Management ◽  
Vertebrate Zoology ◽  
Education And Outreach ◽  
Safety Assessments ◽  
And Storage

Q?rius is an interactive learning venue at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) designed specifically for a teen audience. The space gives visitors a chance to interact with museum specimens, especially in the Collections Zone. The Q?rius collections are non-accessioned education collections, belonging to the Office of Education and Outreach (E&O). The collections include the Museum’s seven disciplines – Anthropology, Botany, Entomology, Invertebrate Zoology, Mineral Sciences, Paleobiology, and Vertebrate Zoology. Starting in 2013, collections staff began performing safety assessments on specimens before their rehousing and storage in the publicly accessible Collections Zone. Risks assessed include sharpness, ingestibility, radioactivity, and contaminants (such as arsenic, mercury, and lead, which were historically used in specimen preparation or for pest management). Specimen and object fragility was also assessed. The goal of these assessments was to minimize risks to our visitors and to our collections. The safety assessments allow collections staff to make housing recommendations that would ensure the safety of NMNH’s visitors and the preservation of E&O’s collections in a publicly accessible storage space. This practice now extends to other pre-existing learning venues that contain publicly accessible portions of the E&O Collection, further minimizing risks. Staff have started adding the data gathered by these safety assessments to our collections management system, to protect the data from loss and to make the information easily accessible to staff. This poster relates to a second poster, Establishing Legal Title for Non-Accessioned Collections.

scholarly journals Semantically Linking Specimens and Images

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Hyam
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Image Data ◽  
Application Programming Interface ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Software Systems ◽  
Semantic Data ◽  
Metadata Record ◽  
Natural History Collections ◽  
The Web

Many of the world’s natural history collections are creating high resolution digital images of their specimens. They often make these available on the web through some form or zoomable viewer. For historical reasons, a hotchpotch of technologies are used to achieve this. This diversity has lead to two issues. Firstly, maintenance becomes costly as technologies need replacing. Secondly there is little chance to share data between institutions or provide a unified user experience. A researcher visiting four different virtual collections may have four very different experiences. Similar issues exist in the archives and libraries disciplines. They also need to share high resolution, annotated images of the physical objects in their care. In response to this issue many have coalesced around the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). IIIF is a set of shared application programming interface (API) specifications for interoperable functionality in digital image repositories. It separates the notion of a viewer, which may be used as part of a website or other application, and the web services that feed data to that viewer. By using a common API for serving data about images, different viewers can be used to view the same images, thus providing an upgrade path that does not require replacement of viewer and server software at the same time and allows different viewers to be used for the same image data. Potentially more importantly, it facilitates the construction of applications that view data from different collections as if they were in the same place. From the researcher’s point of view, the experience could be the same whether the virtual specimen is hosted locally or in a museum on another continent. There is one important thing that has been deliberately omitted from the IIIF standard. This has both enabled its rapid adoption but also makes it incomplete for building research applications. IIIF transmits no semantic data about the subject of the images, only labels. The IIIF data therefore needs to be bound to semantically rich data about the specimens being viewed, in some uniform way. Consortium of Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF ) specimen identifiers are now widely adopted by natural history collections in Europe. Each individual collection object is designated by a URI chosen and maintained by the institution owning the specimen (Groom et al. 2017, Güntsch et al. 2018, Güntsch et al. 2017, HYAM et al. 2012). Under Linked Data conventions, content negotiation is used at the server so that users accessing an object using a web-browser are redirected to a human-readable representation of the object, typically a web-page, whilst software systems requiring machine-processable representations are redirected to an RDF-encoded metadata record. CETAF specimen identifiers are therefore ideal partners for IIIF representations of specimens. But how should we join the two together in a semantically rich way that will be generally understandable? SYNTHESYS+ is a European Commission funded programme that facilitates collaboration and network building among European natural history collections. It is concerned with both physical and virtual access to the 390 million specimens of plants and animals housed in participating institutions. Under Task 4.3 of this project, we have been working to create a reliable way to link between the RDF metadata about specimens and images of those specimens in IIIF as well as from images of specimens back to metadata of those specimens. By January 2021, we aim to have ten exemplar institutions publishing IIIF manifest files linked to CETAF identifiers for a few million specimens and for this to act as a catalyst for wider adoption in the natural history community. This presentation gives an update on the rollout of these implementations, paying particular attention to the challenges of semantically annotating specimens with images.

Animal Stories

Runaway ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Chaney
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
Konrad Lorenz

This chapter narrates Bateson's cultivation of Konrad Lorenz as a friend and colleague in the spring of 1966. The Austrian Lorenz was a famed expert on animal behavior and one of the fathers of ethology. Lorenz and Bateson shared a foundation in natural history and a dislike of behaviorism. These matters featured a debate among scientists over the usefulness of the term "instinct" and were specialized versions of a broader nature-nurture debate. Lorenz sent Bateson his newly-published masterpiece of popular ethology, On Aggression. Lorenz's argument in the book is summarized with examples from the behavior of cichlids, geese, and rats. The chapter touches on suspicions of Lorenz's early work as sympathetic to Nazi ideology and, in turn, suspicions of holist approaches to biology in general as politically reactionary. Bateson's engagement with On Aggression was contemporaneous with a reading of T. H. White's The Sword and the Stone, and the chapter explores the resonance between the two books. Both reflect a postwar rehabilitation of the animal as a symbol of brutality and amorality. They spoke to Cold War anxieties concerning whether aggression in humans was instinctive.

scholarly journals Natural history of Ctenus medius Keyserling, 1891 (Araneae, Ctenidae) I: observations on habitats and the development of chromatic patterns

2000 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. E. ALMEIDA ◽  
E. F. RAMOS ◽  
E. GOUVÊA ◽  
M. do CARMO-SILVA ◽  
J. COSTA
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Natural History ◽  
National Park ◽  
Common Species ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
Mata Atlântica ◽  
Adult Females ◽  
History Of ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
Phoneutria Nigriventer

Ctenus medius Keyserling, 1891 is a common species in several spots of Mata Atlântica, however there is a great lack of studies in all aspects of its natural history. This work aims to elucidate aspects of ecotope preference compared to large spiders, and to provide data on the development of chromatic patterns during its life cycle. The observations on the behavior of C. medius were done in the campus of Centro Universitário de Barra Mansa (UBM) by means of observations and nocturnal collections using cap lamps. For observations on the development of chromatic patterns, spiderlings raised in laboratory, hatched from an oviposition of a female from campus of UBM, and others spiderlings collected in field were used. The field observations indicate that: C. medius seems to prefer ecotopes characterized by dense shrub vegetation or herbal undergrowth; Lycosa erythrognatha and L. nordeskioldii seems to prefer open sites; Phoneutria nigriventer seems to prefer shrub vegetation and anthropogenic ecotopes as rubbish hills; Ancylometes sp. seems to prefer ecotopes near streams. Concerning chromatic patterns, it was observed that males and females show well distinct patterns during the last two instars, allowing distinction by sex without the use of a microscope. Through chromatic patterns it was also possible to draw a distinction between C. medius and C. ornatus longer that 3 mm cephalothorax width. 69 specimens of C. medius (males and females) collected in the campus of UBM did not show a striking polymorphism in chromatic pattern, but one among 7 adult females collected in National Park of Itatiaia, showed a distinct chromatic pattern.

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