ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers.
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Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ethical collectomics: A guide to the responsible and fair mobilization of natural history collections.Bioscience · 2026Article
- The utility of herbarium collections for genetic monitoring.Bioscience · 2026Review
- Using herbarium collections to study genetic responses to global change.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Digitised herbarium specimen data reveal a climate change-related trend to an earlier, shorter Canadian Arctic flowering season, and phylogenetic signal in Arctic flowering times.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- From Knowledge to Action: Next Steps for the Natural Science Collections Community.Bioscience · 2026Article
- Novel 20th century rotavirus alphagastroenteritidis strains identified in formalin-fixed and ethanol-preserved museum specimens.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- High-throughput phenomics of global ant biodiversity.Nature methods · 2026Article
- Application of Computer Vision to the Automated Extraction of Metadata from Natural History Specimen Labels: A Case Study on Herbarium Specimens.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Dorsal skin biopsies: A non-lethal sampling method for studying amphibians, including the highly endangered Harlequin frogs (Bufonidae:bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Mapping Biodiversity Through Time and Space: Patterns and Drivers of Fabaceae Collection in Mozambique.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Tracing Taonga Trajectories: A Methodological Framework for Indigenous Heritage Mapping.Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand · 2026Article
- A Darwin Core dataset of scorpions (Arachnida, Scorpiones) from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS) Collections.Biodiversity data journal · 2026Article
- Article
- Gaps in trait data and conservation impediments from the Raunkiæran shortfall in a megadiverse nation.iScience · 2025Article
- Unlocking natural history collections to improve eDNA reference databases and biodiversity monitoring.Bioscience · 2025Article
- The hidden biodiversity knowledge split in biological collections.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The hidden biodiversity knowledge split in biological collections.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Long-Term Phenological Shifts in Butterfly Species from Transylvania, Romania-A Case Study.Insects · 2025Article
- Little long-term change in regional species richness of tropical butterflies over the past 166 years masks turnover in community composition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The Impact of Whole-Animal Fluid Preservation on the Observed Gut Microbiome of Vertebrates: Implications for the Use of Museum Specimens in Microbiome Research.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Global change has become a central focus of modern biology. Yet, our knowledge of how anthropogenic drivers affect biodiversity and natural resources is limited by a lack of biological data spanning the Anthropocene. We propose that the hundreds of millions of plant, fungal and animal specimens deposited in natural history museums have the potential to transform the field of global change biology. We suggest that museum specimens are underused, particularly in ecological studies, given their capacity to reveal patterns that are not observable from other data sources. Increasingly, museum specimens are becoming mobilized online, providing unparalleled access to physiological, ecological and evolutionary data spanning decades and sometimes centuries. Here, we describe the diversity of collections data archived in museums and provide an overview of the diverse uses and applications of these data as discussed in the accompanying collection of papers within this theme issue. As these unparalleled resources are under threat owing to budget cuts and other institutional pressures, we aim to shed light on the unique discoveries that are possible in museums and, thus, the singular value of natural history collections in a period of rapid change.This article is part of the theme issue 'Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene'.
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