Relevance of Specimen Citations to Conservation

Goldblatt et al. (1992) recently reviewed the importance of citing voucher specimens in the context of molecular systematic studies. We wish to revisit the topic of specimen citation from the perspective of overall information content in systematic studies and its ultimate relevance to conservation. Our concern stems from the significant decrease in comprehensiveness (total number of citations) and level of detail in citations by some journals. For reasons outlined below, we believe that both the comprehensiveness and detail in specimen citation lists should be increased. Many regions of conservation concern are increasingly threatened by environmental degradation, and conservation biologists often require copious quantities of data concerning the distribution of species in order to establish conservation priorities (Cox et al. 1994). For scientists evaluating regional-scale problems, much of this information is provided by “specimen-cited” lists found in systematic monographs and revisions. By referring to the specimens actually examined by a systematist during the revisionary process, such lists traditionally have served a number of direct and indirect purposes: documenting the known geographic range of taxa; serving notice of changed identifications by specialists; helping to relay the range of morphological variation within taxa; enabling future workers to set collecting priorities based on known occurrences in time and space; revealing emergent properties of taxa, such as relative frequencies in geographical areas and habitat types; and assisting biologists who must assess the conservation status of rare and threatened taxa (Soberón et al. 1996). Proper citations in systematic revisions should include the following information, when available: all major political subdivisions, specific locality, latitude and longitude, date, elevation, other appropriate observations (habitat, behavior, host plant or animal), collector(s) name(s) and number, and the institutions in which duplicates are known to occur. Clearly, each systematic subdiscipline has its own categories of pertinent collection information. As an example for vascular plants, the following actual citation provides detailed information for a newly described species (Snow & Guymer 1999):