The changing role of collections and field research

Abstract

Introduction: Every herbarium or museum I have ever worked in has suffered from lack of space for ever-increasing collections. Constraints on funding for large institutions, coupled with the historic lack of support for taxonomy as a discipline, has sometimes meant that institutions have felt the need to get rid of specimens – something most systematists would say they abhor on principle. Here I will explore alternative ways of thinking about specimens and the documentation of the diversity of life on Earth for the twenty-first century, which might involve us casting aside preconceived notions of what the best or only way to collect could be. Perhaps we ought to only collect specimens for DNA analysis – a leaf in silica gel or an insect in alcohol? What should be collected as a matter of routine? How difficult might it be to obtain permission to do a new sort of collecting? None of these questions has an easy answer, and I will explore some possible alternative approaches to the traditional insect on a pin or herbarium specimen. Collecting itself has also changed radically. Systematists collect for a variety of reasons – floristic, faunistic and monographical research all have different goals, and perhaps require different collecting strategies. I will suggest that the future need not be exactly the same as the past, and that we can tailor our collecting to purpose much more effectively than we have done. New collecting techniques will also open up biodiversity inventory and study in some parts of the world beyond the systematic community – something that should not frighten us, but that we should welcome as the diversity of life comes under ever greater threat. Why collect specimens?, Taxonomists collect specimens as the evidence with which they construct hypotheses of identity or relationships. As such, specimens are an integral and essential part of taxonomic practice and are part of what makes taxonomy (defined here as phylogeny, identification and description, see Godfray and Knapp, 2004) a scientific discipline. A specimen is a preserved organism, or part of an organism, that is a data point recording that organism’s occurrence at a particular place in a particular time.