Science Enabled by Specimen Data
Arfianti, T., and M. J. Costello. 2021. The distribution of benthic amphipod crustaceans in Indonesian seas. PeerJ 9: e12054. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.12054
Amphipod crustaceans are an essential component of tropical marine biodiversity. However, their distribution and biogeography have not been analysed in one of the world’s largest tropical countries nested in the Coral Triangle, Indonesia. We collected and identified amphipod crustaceans from eight s…
Wang, C.-J., and J.-Z. Wan. 2021. Functional trait perspective on suitable habitat distribution of invasive plant species at a global scale. Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation 19: 475–486. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pecon.2021.07.002
Plant invasion has been proved to threaten biodiversity conservation and ecosystem maintenance at a global scale. It is a challenge to project suitable habitat distributions of invasive plant species (IPS) for invasion risk assessment at large spatial scales. Interaction outcomes between native and …
Majure, L. C., A. Blankenship, A. Grinage, and A. Noa-Monzón. 2021. Castela (Simaroubaceae), an impressive New World radiation of thorny shrubs destined for edaphically dry habitats. Brazilian Journal of Botany 45: 237–249. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40415-021-00742-8
Castela Turpin is composed of 16 known species and is found throughout edaphically dry zones across the American continents from the Sonoran Desert to the southern South American Chaco biogeographic region and Caribbean seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTF). Castela is most diverse in the SDTF of t…
Baumbach, L., D. L. Warren, R. Yousefpour, and M. Hanewinkel. 2021. Climate change may induce connectivity loss and mountaintop extinction in Central American forests. Communications Biology 4. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02359-9
The tropical forests of Central America serve a pivotal role as biodiversity hotspots and provide ecosystem services securing human livelihood. However, climate change is expected to affect the species composition of forest ecosystems, lead to forest type transitions and trigger irrecoverable losses…
Dellinger, A. S., R. Pérez‐Barrales, F. A. Michelangeli, D. S. Penneys, D. M. Fernández‐Fernández, and J. Schönenberger. 2021. Low bee visitation rates explain pollinator shifts to vertebrates in tropical mountains. New Phytologist 231: 864–877. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.17390
Evolutionary shifts from bee to vertebrate pollination are common in tropical mountains. Reduction in bee pollination efficiency under adverse montane weather conditions was proposed to drive these shifts. Although pollinator shifts are central for the evolution and diversification of angiosperms, w…
Cooper, N., A. L. Bond, J. L. Davis, R. Portela Miguez, L. Tomsett, and K. M. Helgen. 2019. Sex biases in bird and mammal natural history collections. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 286: 20192025. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2025
Natural history specimens are widely used across ecology, evolutionary biology and conservation. Although biological sex may influence all of these areas, it is often overlooked in large-scale studies using museum specimens. If collections are biased towards one sex, studies may not be representativ…
Li, X., B. Li, G. Wang, X. Zhan, and M. Holyoak. 2020. Deeply digging the interaction effect in multiple linear regressions using a fractional-power interaction term. MethodsX 7: 101067. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2020.101067
In multiple regression Y ~ β0 + β1X1 + β2X2 + β3X1 X2 + ɛ., the interaction term is quantified as the product of X1 and X2. We developed fractional-power interaction regression (FPIR), using βX1M X2N as the interaction term. The rationale of FPIR is that the slopes of Y-X1 regression along the X2 gr…
Tan, K., T. Lu, and M.-X. Ren. 2020. Biogeography and evolution of Asian Gesneriaceae based on updated taxonomy. PhytoKeys 157: 7–26. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.157.34032
Based on an updated taxonomy of Gesneriaceae, the biogeography and evolution of the Asian Gesneriaceae are outlined and discussed. Most of the Asian Gesneriaceae belongs to Didymocarpoideae, except Titanotrichum was recently moved into Gesnerioideae. Most basal taxa of the Asian Gesneriaceae are fou…
Goodwin, Z. A., P. Muñoz-Rodríguez, D. J. Harris, T. Wells, J. R. I. Wood, D. Filer, and R. W. Scotland. 2020. How long does it take to discover a species? Systematics and Biodiversity 18: 784–793. https://doi.org/10.1080/14772000.2020.1751339
The description of a new species is a key step in cataloguing the World’s flora. However, this is only a preliminary stage in a long process of understanding what that species represents. We investigated how long the species discovery process takes by focusing on three key stages: 1, the collection …
Arfianti, T., and M. Costello. 2020. Global biogeography of marine amphipod crustaceans: latitude, regionalization, and beta diversity. Marine Ecology Progress Series 638: 83–94. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps13272
Studying the biogeography of amphipod crustaceans is of interest because they play an important role at lower trophic levels in ecosystems. Because they lack a planktonic larval stage, it has been hypothesized that marine benthic amphipod crustaceans may have short dispersal distances, high endemici…