Researchers at the University of Vermont have created a method that allows outdoor species to be counted from indoor records. Scientists will be able to use museum records to identify species in decline over time. They may also need additional protection to keep them from becoming extinct. Credit: Joshua Brown, UVM
The museum collections of small mammals, insects, amphibians, and fish are a good representation of the relative abundance of most species in the wild. This surprising study was done by University of Vermont researchers and international scientist. They analyzed 73,000 museum records of more than 22,00 species and 1.4 million field observations.
Scientists will be able to use museum records to identify species in decline over time. This could help to protect them from becoming extinct. Conservation biologists can also use this method to analyze how species' rarity and commonality changes over time and from environmental disturbances like climate change and urbanization.
The findings were published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution journal. They can be used to help address challenges in traditional conservation methods. It is important to determine if species are endangered or rare. However, large-scale field surveys can be costly and time-consuming.
Traditional conservation methods often focus on charismatic species, or measures of overall biodiversity. Field surveys only provide a snapshot of the current state of the species and not what was there in the past. Museum collections, on the other hand, can have thousands of specimen records from many collectors around the world that span decades or even centuries. These collections are not standardized and it is difficult to know if the number of records for a species in a museum represents its natural abundance over time.
This avenue of research is also enhanced by the millions upon millions of museum specimens being digitalized and made online. The analysis of museum records can provide unique insight into the changing nature of natural communities as the pace of environmental change accelerates.
Scientists were amazed at how consistent this relationship was across animal and plant groups, despite the differences in the data sets' collection methods, spatial extents, and time frames. This relationship is unique and opens up exciting research opportunities.
A new University of Vermont-led research has revealed that a team of international scientists has developed a method for counting outdoor species from indoor museum records. Scientists will be able to use museum records to identify species in decline over time. They may also need additional protection to protect them. Credit: Joshua Brown, UVM
Nicholas Gotelli, University of Vermont (UVM), is the lead author. "We can use that relationship to predict relative abundance of species wild when field collection are not possible or impossible," he says. It also allows us to estimate the relative abundance for species from previous decades, even for species currently rare or extinct.
The 2019 work started when ant experts Douglas Booher, Andy Suarez (University of Illinois), Corrie Moreau and Corrie Gooher approached UVM's Gotelli to collaborate on the analysis of over 18,000 museum records of Floridan ants from the past 60 year.
Gotelli recalls that the Florida ant dataset provided an incredible window into the past. It suggested that non-native species had gradually become ecological dominators over a period of many decades. However, I was concerned that a reviewer might simply ask if museum specimen records can be correlated with species' abundance in field.
Booher developed a subset from museum data that could be used to calibrate field collections taken at the same time and in the same locations. These data showed a strong correlation between each species' relative abundance in the field and their museum collections. "We immediately wondered if this was something unique for Florida ants, or a general pattern for animals and plants from other locations," stated Gotelli, a professor of Biology in UVM's College of Arts and Sciences and Gund Institute for Environment.
To obtain more calibration datasets, the research team reached out to museum experts from all over the globe. They then repeated their analysis using curated survey and museum data from 17 different animal and plant datasets around the globe, including New Hampshire bees (and North Carolina butterflies), North Carolina small mammals (and Nevada amphibians), Connecticut wildflowers, German soil invertebrates, Connecticut wildflowers, and Massachusetts trees at Walden Pond. While not all data sets were as strong as the Florida ants, the results were similar: species that are rare in the wild were found abundantly in museum collections for species that are common in the wild.
Corrie Moreau, Cornell University co-author, said that "this is really exciting." "This is yet another example of how important museum collections are scientifically. I'm sure the people who collected these specimens many decades ago or centuries ago didn't know all the uses they would find. Andy Suarez, University of Illinois coauthor, said: "Our study showed that despite the many random ways that people have collected specimens in the past," that the vast collections at natural history museums can address important questions that cannot be answered in any other way.
Booher, Yale University, makes one important distinction: "We also found out that species that are uncommon in the wild are consistently under-represented within museum records, while common species are over-represented within these data sets." This is the "Easter egg syndrome", which reflects collectors' natural instinct to prefer rare specimens to keep in museums, and to overlook individuals of more common species.
