Going, Going, Gone The Diminishing Capacity of Museum Specimen Collections to Address Global Change Research: A Case Study on Urban Reptiles

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Museums play an important role in research by providing specimens of animals collected across time and space. Traditionally, these collections were used mainly for taxonomy. A contemporary use is to investigate temporal changes in the presence of species during urbanization. We used a study area in Perth, Western Australia, to test whether museum collections of 13 common reptile species were adequate to assess how urbanization in Perth had affected the presence of reptile species. We found that sampling was not adequate to answer this question, with 91% of our study region considered poorly sampled. We encourage a renewed focus on building the collections of museums. ABSTRACT: It has been increasingly popular to use natural history specimens to examine environmental changes. As the current functionality of museum specimens has extended beyond their traditional taxonomic role, there has been a renewed focus on the completeness of biological collections to provide data for current and future research. We used the collections of the Western Australian Museum to answer questions about the change in occurrence of five common reptile species due to the rapid urbanization of Perth. We recorded a significant decline in collection effort from the year 2000 onwards (F = 7.65, p < 0.01) compared to the period 1990–1999. Spatial analysis revealed that only 0.5% of our study region was well sampled, 8.5% were moderately sampled and the majority of the regions (91%) were poorly sampled. By analysing the trend of specimen acquisition from 1950 to 2010, we discovered a significant inconsistency in specimen sampling effort for 13 common reptile species across time and space. A large proportion of past specimens lacked information including the place and time of collection. An increase in investment to museums and an increase in geographically and temporally systematic collecting is advocated to ensure that collections can answer questions about environmental change.