The role of natural history collections in documenting species declines

Shaffer, H. Bradley; Fisher, Robert N.; Davidson, Carlos

doi:10.1016/s0169-5347(97)01177-4

Cited by 303 publications

(259 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Thus, the data suggest that a runaway train of extinction is now likely to produce what would be seen as a global mass extinction on the ultimately more important landscape of geological time. Mitigating this crisis will require strong ongoing support of monitoring by field ecologists and museum scientists (18).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Current extinction rates of reptiles and amphibians

Alroy

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

218

143

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There is broad concern that a mass extinction of amphibians and reptiles is now underway. Here I apply an extremely conservative Bayesian method to estimate the number of recent amphibian and squamate extinctions in nine important tropical and subtropical regions. The data stem from a combination of museum collection databases and published site surveys. The method computes an extinction probability for each species by considering its sighting frequency and last sighting date. It infers hardly any extinction when collection dates are randomized and it provides underestimates when artificial extinction events are imposed. The method also appears to be insensitive to trends in sampling; therefore, the counts it provides are absolute minimums. Extinctions or severe population crashes have accumulated steadily since the 1970s and 1980s, and at least 3.1% of frog species have already disappeared. Based on these data and this conservative method, the best estimate of the global grand total is roughly 200 extinctions. Consistent with previous results, frog losses are heavy in Latin America, which has been greatly affected by the pathogenic chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Extinction rates are now four orders-of-magnitude higher than background, and at least another 6.9% of all frog species may be lost within the next century, even if there is no acceleration in the growth of environmental threats.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Current extinction rates of reptiles and amphibians

Alroy

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

218

143

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“…Besides, several studies as well as important data stored in collections were either not published yet or were so in nonindexed literature (Silvano and Segalla 2005). It is widely recognized that taxonomic collections are important tools to generate species lists (Shaffer et al 1998), providing fundamental insights towards the understanding of biodiversity and biogeography that will ultimately allow the development of adequate conservation strategies (Haddad 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Amphibians from southeastern state of Pará: Carajás Region, northern Brazil

Pinheiro¹,

Bitar²,

Galatti³

et al. 2012

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The region of Carajás in the southeast of the state of Pará, Brazil, harbors five reserves, with various managing categories, distributed throughout five municipalities. A list of amphibians known to occur in this region was compiled using information on the specimens deposited in the herpetological collection of the Goeldi Museum, collected during the past four decades (1969 - 2010). According to the available metadata, the species were tabulated in three environments: ombrophylous forest (rainforest), metalophic savanna (MS) and anthropic areas (AA - secondary forest - disturbed areas), resulting in 13 families and 71 species (66 anurans and 5 Gymnophiona). Ombrophylous forest has 50 species, anthropic areas has 49 species, while metalophic savanna has 38 species of anuran.

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“…It is not unusual for there to be a spatial bias and/or incomplete dataset for any taxonomic group included in these databases owing to sampling error, and data storage and mobilization (Yesson et al 2007, Beck et al 2014. Nevertheless, data derived from these sources are being used increasingly for purposes such as taxonomic revisions (Pennisi 2000), environmental niche modeling (Vasconcelos et al 2012), compilation of "redlists" of threatened species (Shaffer et al 1998), and biodiversity assessment (Ponder et al 2001, Yesson et al 2007 and references therein).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The utility of open-access biodiversity information in representing anurans in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and Cerrado

Vasconcelos¹,

Nascimento²

2014

Phyllomedusa

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The utility of open-access biodiversity information in representing anurans in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and Cerrado. Many geographic coordinates of species are only available in biological collections, and sometimes it is difficult to access these data. However, recent initiatives promise to compile and organize such biodiversity data at a global scale. We evaluated the effectiveness of open-access biodiversity information for forecasting the occurrence of anurans in two Brazilian hotspots -the Atlantic Forest (AF) and the Cerrado (CER). We compiled all available point-occurrence records for anuran species in both hotspots and identified the regions in each of the two hotspots having the highest and lowest number of anuran occurrences based on information from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the SpeciesLink project. A total of 13,130 point-occurrence records were recovered for 409 anurans from the AF (~77% of the known species) and 12,729 records for 176 species (~85% of the known species) from the CER. Density of point occurrence data is not randomly distributed within the hotspots. The greatest density of Atlantic Forest records is in southeastern Brazil, and the densest areas in Cerrado occur in the transitional zones to the Atlantic Forest. Comparison of these results with previous studies based on traditional museum information revealed that many important collections of anurans from these hotspots are not included in GBIF and SpeciesLink.

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The role of natural history collections in documenting species declines

Cited by 303 publications

References 22 publications

Current extinction rates of reptiles and amphibians

Current extinction rates of reptiles and amphibians

Amphibians from southeastern state of Pará: Carajás Region, northern Brazil

The utility of open-access biodiversity information in representing anurans in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and Cerrado

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