Integrating museum collections in biodiversity and genomics research

Natural history collections harbor invaluable biodiversity information, such as species occurrence and genetic data, that is underutilized in biodiversity and conservation research. As global biodiversity and environments rapidly change, the value of this data has become increasingly recognized, as the temporal dimension of specimen data allows us to quantify and characterize population changes over time. This is especially valuable for historically understudied taxa, like most insect species, and for data types that would be otherwise unobtainable (e.g. molecular data). Here, we demonstrate two ways in which we are integrating collections data into our research on butterflies in the US to contextualize biodiversity change over time. First, by matching museum specimens with contemporary sampling localities, we can collect occurrence and genetic data to better estimate historical ranges and reveal occupancy and genetic diversity changes over time, as well as zoom in on trends at the population-level and finer geographic scales. Second, historical specimens can be used to evaluate the performance of predictive models by providing data with a temporal dimension. To better understand environmental impacts and inform conservation efforts, many models have been constructed to predict species’ predicaments under future conditions based on current conditions, but these predictions cannot be verified in the present. Using historical specimens as a baseline, we can compare what the model predicts of contemporary populations with their actual observed statuses to evaluate predictive performance and therefore utility of these models in understanding biodiversity and environmental change.