Challenges and opportunities for using natural history collections to estimate insect population trends

Abstract

Natural history collections (NHC) provide a wealth of information that can be used to understand the impacts of global change on biodiversity. As such, there is growing interest in using NHC data to estimate changes in species' distributions and abundance trends over historic time horizons when contemporary survey data are limited or unavailable. However, museum specimens were not collected with the purpose of estimating population trends and thus can exhibit spatiotemporal and collector‐specific biases that can impose severe limitations to using NHC data for evaluating population trajectories. Here we review the challenges associated with using museum records to track long‐term insect population trends, including spatiotemporal biases in sampling effort and sparse temporal coverage within and across years. We highlight recent methodological advancements that aim to overcome these challenges and discuss emerging research opportunities. Specifically, we examine the potential of integrating museum records and other contemporary data sources (e.g. collected via structured, designed surveys and opportunistic citizen science programs) in a unified analytical framework that accounts for the sampling biases associated with each data source. The emerging field of integrated modelling provides a promising framework for leveraging the wealth of collections data to accurately estimate long‐term trends of insect populations and identify cases where that is not possible using existing data sources.

A Dataset of Marine Macroinvertebrate Diversity from Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe

“…Digitizing natural history collections (NHC) in online databases is an important source of information, both historical and current [6], that can provide an invaluable insight into how communities and ecosystems change over time. In some cases, long-term effects of global climatic changes can only be studied using NHC data [7]. Despite the numerous online databases, containing over one billion records [8], occurrence data from marine macroinvertebrates from MOZ and STP are difficult to find.…”

Synthesis of natural history collections data reveals patterns of US freshwater mussel diversity and decline

“…An additional ecological attribute used as a primary criterion to evaluate conservation status is the change in a species AOO over time (IUCN - IUCN 2012; ESA - Smith et al 2018). Natural history collections data is uniquely positioned to measure how species ranges have changed across time, but such insights are not without major challenges including significant temporal, taxonomic and spatial biases (Meyer et al 2016; Kharouba et al 2019; Davis et al 2022). An additional complication of determining temporal changes is when subjective timeframes are used to define a species “historic” and “recent” distribution (e.g., pre- and post-1960 (Metcalfe-Smith et al 1998); pre- and post-1990 (Blevins et al 2017); pre- and post-1995 (Smith et al 2021); pre- and post-2000 (Johnson et al 2016)).…”

“…Our method of accounting for temporal variation in collecting effort minimizes changes in AOO and is designed to be a conservative estimate of changes in AOO (at least in occurrence-rich taxa). Integrating specimen-based collections data with additional data sources, especially the abundance of state and federal survey data, via integrated modeling could be useful to improving these estimates (Davis et al 2022).…”

Time counts in animal ecology

“…Reviews implicitly rely on time in that they integrate concepts, experiments and synthetic findings that typically take years—if not decades—of investigation by the research community to acquire. Recent reviews in Journal of Animal Ecology include works on energetic‐based migratory tactics (Evans & Bearhop, 2022), the use of museum collections to quantify insect population trends (Davis et al, 2022), or the responses of mammals to climate change (Paniw et al, 2021). Likewise, Long‐Term Studies explicitly depend on time for the acquisition of data in a particular system, from which a comprehensive narrative that integrates multiple key findings emerges.…”

“…As such, time is also key to examining core aspects such as local adaptation (Hansen et al, 2002), speciation (Knudsen et al, 2010), or community assembly (Weslien et al, 2011). The importance of temporal replication in ecology and evolution is such that one could simply not answer most of the '100 fundamental ecological questions' identified by Sutherland et al (2013) (Evans & Bearhop, 2022), the use of museum collections to quantify insect population trends (Davis et al, 2022), or the responses of mammals to climate change (Paniw et al, 2021). Likewise, Long-Term Studies explicitly depend on time for the acquisition of data in a particular system, from which a comprehensive narrative that integrates multiple key findings emerges.…”