Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2012 Jun 7;279(1736):2269-74.
doi: 10.1098/rspb.2011.2439. Epub 2012 Feb 1.

Big hitting collectors make massive and disproportionate contribution to the discovery of plant species

Daniel P Bebber  1 , Mark A Carine, Gerrit Davidse, David J Harris, Elspeth M Haston, Malcolm G Penn, Steve Cafferty, John R I Wood, Robert W Scotland
Affiliations

Big hitting collectors make massive and disproportionate contribution to the discovery of plant species

Daniel P Bebber et al. Proc Biol Sci. .

Abstract

Discovering biological diversity is a fundamental goal--made urgent by the alarmingly high rate of extinction. We have compiled information from more than 100,000 type specimens to quantify the role of collectors in the discovery of plant diversity. Our results show that more than half of all type specimens were collected by less than 2 per cent of collectors. This highly skewed pattern has persisted through time. We demonstrate that a number of attributes are associated with prolific plant collectors: a long career with increasing productivity and experience in several countries and plant families. These results imply that funding a small number of expert plant collectors in the right geographical locations should be an important element in any effective strategy to find undiscovered plant species and complete the inventory of the world flora.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Type specimens per collector. (a) Kernel density estimates on log10(T) for Edinburgh (black), Melbourne (red), Missouri (green) and NHM (blue). (b) Rank abundance curves.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Rank abundance through time. Types per collector by collector rank for 1700–1800 (black), 1801–1850 (red), 1851–1900 (green), 1901–1950 (blue), 1951–2011 (cyan). (a) Edinburgh. (b) Melbourne. (c) Missouri. (d) NHM.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Types by duration of collecting activity. (a) Edinburgh. (b) Melbourne. (c) Missouri. (d) NHM. Bold line and broken lines show best-fit standard error for power regressions. Narrow line shows predicted value where exponent = 1. Exponents for the data were significantly less than one (electronic supplementary material, table S1).
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Rate of type discovery by duration of collection activity. (a) Edinburgh. (b) Melbourne. (c) Missouri. (d) NHM. ‘Big Hitters’ (the most-prolific collectors responsible for greater than 50% of all types in a collection) are shown as filled circles. Big Hitters are active for longer, and have higher rates of collection, but overall the rate of collection declines during duration.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Bisby F. A., Shimura J., Ruggiero M., Edwards J., Haeuser C. 2002. Taxonomy at the click of a mouse. Nature 418, 367.10.1038/418367a (doi:10.1038/418367a) - DOI - DOI - PubMed
    1. JSTOR Plant Science. See http://0-plants.jstor.org.www.slrlc.org/action/about (accessed 14 October 2011).
    1. Pearson D. L., Hamilton A. L., Erwin T. L. 2011. Recovery plan for the endangered taxonomy profession. BioScience 61, 58–6310.1525/bio.2011.61.1.11 (doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.1.11) - DOI - DOI
    1. Stuart S. N., Wilson E. O., McNeely J. A., Mittermeier R. A., Rodriguez J. P. 2010. The barometer of life. Science 328, 177.10.1126/science.1188606 (doi:10.1126/science.1188606) - DOI - DOI - PubMed
    1. Wilson E. O. 2000. A global biodiversity map. Science 289, 2279.10.1126/science.289.5488.2279 (doi:10.1126/science.289.5488.2279) - DOI - DOI - PubMed

Publication types