New insights from old bugs: assessing hidden biodiversity in insect collections

尽管它们在生态上很重要，但我们对大多数昆虫群体的全球或区域物种格局知之甚少，特别是在几十年的时间尺度上。这一“生物多样性危机”限制了我们(对于昆虫)回答关于引进或入侵物种的存在、物种对人类活动的脆弱性以及物种和栖息地保护的问题。由于库存成本高，缺乏训练有素的分类学家，以及高度的多样性(加拿大有66000种昆虫，而鸟类只有几百种)，因此需要来自大规模清单的数据，但很难获得。我们认为，大规模清查的结果已经存在，但由于分散在各地区的小型博物馆缺乏协调和样本处理，这些结果被隐藏起来。马里泰斯的大学、政府实验室和省级自然历史博物馆的许多昆虫收藏超过了100年，但大多数都是没有被识别或没有被组织成可访问的格式(即标准数据库)的标本。数以万计的昆虫标本属于这一类；如果这些数据可以处理并公布结果，这些数据将可以用来回答与以人类为基础的活动和生态学理论有关的问题，并允许研究人员将重点放在未来的收集上，而不是重复过去但隐藏的工作。我们将解决5个主要昆虫群体，我们对这些昆虫群体拥有识别和培训方面的专业知识，并了解其生态和栖息地要求。我们将在我们的目标群体中识别和存储以前从地区和国家博物馆收藏的标本开始挖掘已有的“隐藏的生物多样性”信息。然后，我们将使用这些数据来识别动物群的变化及其机制，这些变化可以与其他群体一起测试。这项研究的主要好处将是区域博物馆中昆虫收藏的管理(作为可靠的参考材料)，几大昆虫群体的可访问数据库(用于生态学研究)，以及一群训练有素的分类学家，他们可以识别新的入侵，并将生物多样性工作扩展到其他群体。

Despite their ecological importance, we know little about global or regional species patterns for most insect groups, particularly over time scales of a few decades. This "biodiversity crisis" limits us fromaddressing questions (for insects) about presence of introduced or invasive species, vulnerability of species to human activities, and conservation of species and habitats. Data from large scale inventories are needed, but are difficult to obtain, due to high costs of inventories, lack of trained taxonomists, and high diversity (>66000 insect species in Canada compared to only a few hundred birds). We argue that the results from large-scale inventories already exist, but are hidden, due to a lack of co-ordination and sample processing in small museums scattered throughout the regions. Many insect collections in universities, government labs, and provincial natural history museums in the Maritimes extend over periods of >100 yrs, but most are dominated by specimens that have either not been identified or not been organized into accessible formats (i.e. a standard database). Tens of thousands of insect specimens fall into this category; if these can be processed and results made accessible, the data will become available to answer questions relating to human-based activities and ecological theory, and allow researchers to focus future collecting rather than duplicate past, but hidden, work.  We will tackle 5 major insect groups for which we have expertise in identification and training, and for which ecological and habitat requirements are known.  We will identify and database previously collected specimens from regional and national museum collections in our target groups, to begin the process of mining the "hidden biodiversity" information that already exists.  We will then use these data to identify faunal changes and their mechanisms that can be tested with other groups.  The main benefits from this study will be the curation of insect collections in regional museums (for reliable reference material), an accessible database for several large groups of insects (for ecological studies), and a group of trained taxonomists that can recognize new invasions and extend biodiversity work to other groups.