Shultz Allison J, Adams Benjamin J, Bell Kayce C, Ludt William B, Pauly Gregory B, Vendetti Jann E
Urban Nature Research Center Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Los Angeles CA USA.
Ornithology Department Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Los Angeles CA USA.
Evol Appl. 2020 Jul 2;14(1):233-247. doi: 10.1111/eva.13045. eCollection 2021 Jan.
Urban environments are among the fastest changing habitats on the planet, and this change has evolutionary implications for the organisms inhabiting them. Herein, we demonstrate that natural history collections are critical resources for urban evolution studies. The specimens housed in these collections provide great potential for diverse types of urban evolution research, and strategic deposition of specimens and other materials from contemporary studies will determine the resources and research questions available to future urban evolutionary biologists. As natural history collections are windows into the past, they provide a crucial historical timescale for urban evolution research. While the importance of museum collections for research is generally appreciated, their utility in the study of urban evolution has not been explicitly evaluated. Here, we: (a) demonstrate that museum collections can greatly enhance urban evolution studies, (b) review patterns of specimen use and deposition in the urban evolution literature, (c) analyze how urban versus rural and native versus nonnative vertebrate species are being deposited in museum collections, and (d) make recommendations to researchers, museum professionals, scientific journal editors, funding agencies, permitting agencies, and professional societies to improve archiving policies. Our analyses of recent urban evolution studies reveal that museum specimens can be used for diverse research questions, but they are used infrequently. Further, although nearly all studies we analyzed generated resources that could be deposited in natural history collections (e.g., collected specimens), a minority (12%) of studies actually did so. Depositing such resources in collections is crucial to allow the scientific community to verify, replicate, and/or re-visit prior research. Therefore, to ensure that adequate museum resources are available for future urban evolutionary biology research, the research community-from practicing biologists to funding agencies and professional societies-must make adjustments that prioritize the collection and deposition of urban specimens.
城市环境是地球上变化最快的栖息地之一，这种变化对栖息其中的生物具有进化意义。在此，我们证明自然历史藏品是城市进化研究的关键资源。这些藏品中的标本为各类城市进化研究提供了巨大潜力，而来自当代研究的标本及其他材料的战略性存放将决定未来城市进化生物学家可利用的资源和研究问题。由于自然历史藏品是了解过去的窗口，它们为城市进化研究提供了至关重要的历史时间尺度。虽然博物馆藏品对研究的重要性已得到普遍认可，但其在城市进化研究中的效用尚未得到明确评估。在此，我们：（a）证明博物馆藏品可极大地促进城市进化研究，（b）回顾城市进化文献中标本使用和存放的模式，（c）分析城市与农村以及本地与非本地脊椎动物物种在博物馆藏品中的存放情况，（d）向研究人员、博物馆专业人员、科学期刊编辑、资助机构、许可机构和专业协会提出建议，以改进存档政策。我们对近期城市进化研究的分析表明，博物馆标本可用于各种研究问题，但使用频率不高。此外，尽管我们分析的几乎所有研究都产生了可存放在自然历史藏品中的资源（如采集的标本），但只有少数（12%）研究实际这样做了。将这些资源存放在藏品中对于科学界验证、重复和/或重新审视先前的研究至关重要。因此，为确保未来城市进化生物学研究有足够的博物馆资源，研究界——从执业生物学家到资助机构和专业协会——必须做出调整，优先考虑城市标本的收集和存放。
