Using insect natural history collections to study global change impacts: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

One contribution of 16 to a theme issue 'Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene'.Over the past two decades, natural history collections (NHCs) have played an increasingly prominent role in global change research, but they have still greater potential, especially for the most diverse group of animals on Earth: insects. Here, we review the role of NHCs in advancing our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary responses of insects to recent global changes. Insect NHCs have helped document changes in insects' geographical distributions, phenology, phenotypic and genotypic traits over time periods up to a century. Recent work demonstrates the enormous potential of NHCs data for examining insect responses at multiple temporal, spatial and phylogenetic scales. Moving forward, insect NHCs offer unique opportunities to examine the morphological, chemical and genomic information in each specimen, thus advancing our understanding of the processes underlying species' ecological and evolutionary responses to rapid, widespread global changes.This article is part of the theme issue 'Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the anthropocene'.

The influence of ecological and life history factors on ectothermic temperature–size responses: Analysis of three Lycaenidae butterflies (Lepidoptera)

“…Furthermore, these collections often cover a wide range of taxa over large spatial areas and temporal periods (Johnson et al, ). There are, however, some potential problems in using museum collections as metadata are often incomplete or missing altogether, which reduces the number of useable specimens (Johnson et al, ; Lister et al, ), and specimens are usually collected opportunistically rather than systematically as part of long‐term projects (Kharouba, Lewthwaite, Guralnick, Kerr, & Vellend, ). Additionally, museum specimens often do not provide an ecological context, such as other species present or abiotic environmental factors, and therefore, the drivers of change may not be apparent (MacLean, Nielsen, Kingsolver, & Buckley, ).…”

“…Furthermore, these collections often cover a wide range of taxa over large spatial areas and temporal periods . There are, however, some potential problems in using museum collections as metadata are often incomplete or missing altogether, which reduces the number of useable specimens Lister et al, 2011), and specimens are usually collected opportunistically rather than systematically as part of long-term projects (Kharouba, Lewthwaite, Guralnick, Kerr, & Vellend, 2018).…”

Museum phylogenomics of extinctOryctesbeetles from the Mascarene Islands

“…Thus, while characterizing biodiversity and the evolutionary relationships among different groups of organisms is today more relevant than ever, species are vanishing from Earth at a higher rate than our capacity to study them. Hence, it is becoming necessary to take a retrospective approach to the study of biodiversity that resides in the global archive provided by natural history collections 31 .…”

Assessing the effectiveness of protected areas for conserving range‐restricted rain forest butterflies in Sabah, Borneo

“…Given that many rain forest species are vulnerable to extinction from land-use and climate change (Brook et al, 2003; World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 2018), and that insect biomass is declining globally (Hallmann et al, 2017), it is important to map species' ranges and determine the effectiveness of protected areas (PAs) at conserving rain forest insects. Data on insect species ranges are limited in the tropics (Cheng & Bonebrake, 2017), and so museum collections are an important resource for supporting insect conservation (Kharouba, Lewthwaite, Guralnick, Kerr, & Vellend, 2018;Ponder, Carter, Flemons, & Chapman, 2001;Tarli, Grandcolas, & Pellens, 2018). Museum records have been used to document insect population declines (Grixti, Wong, Cameron, & Favret, 2009), predict species' distributions (Klorvuttimontara, McClean, & Hill, 2011), and measure phenological shifts (Kharouba et al, 2018); hence, they are an important source of baseline data for conservation planning (Ponder et al, 2001;Tarli et al, 2018), especially in tropical regions where detailed information on species' distributions is generally lacking.…”