Abstract
Changing species assemblages represent major challenges to ecosystems around the world. Retracing these changes is limited by our knowledge of past biodiversity. Natural history collections represent archives of biodiversity and are therefore an unparalleled source to study biodiversity changes. In the present study, we tested the value of natural history collections for reconstructing changes in the abundance and presence of species over time. In total, we scrutinized 17 080 quality-checked records for 242 epibenthic invertebrate species from the North and Baltic Seas collected throughout the last 200 years. Our approaches identified eight previously reported species introductions, 10 range expansions, six of which are new to science, as well as the long-term decline of 51 marine invertebrate species. The cross-validation of our results with published accounts of endangered species and neozoa of the area confirmed the results for two of the approaches for 49 to 55% of the identified species, and contradicted our results for 9 to 10%. The results based on relative record trends were less validated. We conclude that, with the proper approaches, natural history collections are an unmatched resource for recovering early species introductions and declines.
Highlights
Since the dawn of the Anthropocene, distribution patterns and species abundances have become increasingly distorted
This study focuses on three abundant marine invertebrate taxa: Crustacea, Echinodermata and Mollusca
We relied on previously digitized collection records (e.g. [32]) and newly digitized a considerable amount of data for the relevant collections of the Zoological Museum Kiel (ZMK), the Center of Natural History Hamburg (ZMH), the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum (SMF), as well as collections of several natural history collections in northern Germany belonging to a network of museums from the North and Baltic Seas region called NORe
Summary
Since the dawn of the Anthropocene, distribution patterns and species abundances have become increasingly distorted. Species invade new habitats worldwide, shift and expand their ranges, while others decline in abundance or go extinct Historical natural history collections play a major role in these efforts and are sometimes the only resource. A prominent example is the global loss of pollinating insects: a comparison of relative abundances of bumblebees from historical (1900–1999) and recent collections (2007–2009) throughout the United States provided some of the first solid evidence of their dramatic decline [6]. Other inventive examples for the use of natural history collections include the reconstruction of climate-driven geographic range retractions of Australian seaweeds and American mangroves [7,8], of phenological changes in Tibetan plants [9], and of emerging mismatches between flowering time and pollinator emergence [10]
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