The development of a digitising service centre for natural history collections

Digitarium is a joint initiative of the Finnish Museum of Natural History and the University of Eastern Finland. It was established in 2010 as a dedicated shop for the large-scale digitisation of natural history collections. Digitarium offers service packages based on the digitisation process, including tagging, imaging, data entry, georeferencing, filtering, and validation. During the process, all specimens are imaged, and distance workers take care of the data entry from the images. The customer receives the data in Darwin Core Archive format, as well as images of the specimens and their labels. Digitarium also offers the option of publishing images through Morphbank, sharing data through GBIF, and archiving data for long-term storage. Service packages can also be designed on demand to respond to the specific needs of the customer. The paper also discusses logistics, costs, and intellectual property rights (IPR) issues related to the work that Digitarium undertakes.     

Alternative nomenclatural procedures as a potential benefit to natural history collections

It has been argued that adopting alternative nomenclatural procedures would jeopardize the importance of natural history collection by relegating reference specimens to a secondary role. Based on published statements and applications, the present contribution argues that reference specimens are an essential aspect of both the PhyloCode and the cladotypic procedures. Consequently, the latter procedures might actually result in a revival of interest in those collections, mostly by augmenting the number of reference specimens and, for the cladotypic approach, by necessitating appropriate curation and access to up-to-date research facilities.     

No specimen left behind: industrial scale digitization of natural history collections

Traditional approaches for digitizing natural history collections, which include both imaging and metadata capture, are both labour- and time-intensive. Mass-digitization can only be completed if the resource-intensive steps, such as specimen selection and databasing of associated information, are minimized. Digitization of larger collections should employ an “industrial” approach, using the principles of automation and crowd sourcing, with minimal initial metadata collection including a mandatory persistent identifier. A new workflow for the mass-digitization of natural history museum collections based on these principles, and using SatScan® tray scanning system, is described.     

The importance of understanding the natural history of novel species used in research

Husbandry requirements differ greatly between species and failure to meet specific needs can result in widespread morbidity and mortality in populations of laboratory animals; this may be especially true in colonies of exotic animals. The author stresses the need to consider a species' natural history in providing housing and care in a research setting.     

Natural history collections as sources of long-term datasets

In the otherwise excellent special issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution on long-term ecological research (TREE 25(10), 2010), none of the contributors mentioned the importance of natural history collections (NHCs) as sources of data that can strongly complement past and ongoing survey data. Whereas very few field surveys have operated for more than a few decades, NHCs, conserved in museums and other institutions, comprise samples of the Earth's biota typically extending back well into the nineteenth century and, in some cases, before this time. They therefore span the period of accelerated anthropogenic habitat destruction, climate warming and ocean acidification, in many cases reflecting baseline conditions before the major impact of these factors.     

Long-term declines of a highly interactive urban species

Urbanization generates shifts in wildlife communities, with some species increasing their distribution and abundance, while others decline. We used a dataset spanning 15 years to assess trends in distribution and habitat dynamics of the black-tailed prairie dog, a highly interactive species, in urban habitat remnants in Denver, CO, USA. Both available habitat and number of prairie dog colonies declined steeply over the course of the study. However, we did observe new colonization events that correlated with habitat connectivity. Destruction of habitat may be slowing, but the rate of decline of prairie dogs apparently remained unaffected. By using our estimated rates of loss of colonies throughout the study, we projected a 40% probability that prairie dogs will be extirpated from this area by 2067, though that probability could range as high as 50% or as low as 20% depending on the rate of urban development (i.e. habitat loss). Prairie dogs may fulfill important ecological roles in urban landscapes, and could persist in the Denver area with appropriate management and habitat protections.     

The natural history of verb-stem reduplication in Bantu

In this study I present a comparative and historical analysis of “frequentative” Bantu verb-stem reduplication, many of whose variants have been described for a number of Eastern and Southern Bantu languages. While some languages have full-stem compounding, where the stem consists of the verb root plus any and all suffixes, others restrict the reduplicant to two syllables. Two questions are addressed: (i) What was the original nature of reduplication in Proto-Bantu? (ii) What diachronic processes have led to the observed variation? I first consider evidence that the frequentative began as full-stem reduplication, which then became restricted either morphologically (by excluding inflectional and ultimately derivational suffixes) and/or phonologically (by imposing a bisyllabic maximum size constraint). I then turn to the opposite hypothesis and consider evidence and motivations for a conflicting tendency to rebuild full-stem reduplication from the partial reduplicant. I end by attempting to explain why the partial reduplicant is almost always preposed to the fuller base.     

The natural history of Ebola virus in Africa

Several countries spanning the equatorial forest regions of Africa have had outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever over the last three decades. This article is an overview of the many published investigations of how Ebola virus circulates in its natural environment, focusing on the viral reservoir, susceptible animal species, environmental conditions favoring inter-species transmission, and how the infection is transmitted to humans. Major breakthroughs have been made in recent years but many outstanding questions must be dealt with if we are to prevent human outbreaks by interfering with the viral life cycle.     

The qualitative approach in investigating the role of species interactions on stability of natural communities

Community models with competition and mutualism are qualitatively analyzed using the methodology of loop analysis combined with computer stochastic simulation. The concept of "moving equilibrium" in the growth rate of the species is discussed in 14 "tables of predictions", presented as analytical tools that can help to shed light on controversial ecological issues such as direct versus indirect interaction and positive feedback effects on stability. While the stochastic simulation shows that only little or no difference exists in probability of stability between models with competition and models with mutualism, the related tables of predictions show that the networks among links are able to activate indirect interactions, with both negative and positive effects, between any pair of species. This phenomenon makes it difficult to determine how much stability is related to the direct interactions.