[Nhcoll-l] (Re)affirming the specimen gold standard -- Kevin Winker's rebuttal to Minteer et al. opinion piece in Science

[Jay R Cordeiro]

This post appeared in the History of Natural History listserv and will be of interest to SPNHC and NHCOLL subscribers.

Best,
Jay

Jay Cordeiro
Northeast Natural History & Supply-
“for wholesale sales of museum quality archival storage trays as well as provider of new, used, and antiquarian natural history books for the discriminating customer”

Middleboro, MA USA
unionid at comcast.net

From: History of Natural History [mailto:HIST-NAT-HIST at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Karen Reeds
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2014 10:05 AM
To: HIST-NAT-HIST at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: [HIST-NAT-HIST] Fwd: [Nhcoll-l] (Re)affirming the specimen gold standard -- Kevin Winker's rebuttal to Minteer et al. opinion piece in Science

This article by Kevin Winker -- responding to "Avoiding (Re)extinction," by Ben A. Minteer, James P. Collins, Karen E. Love, Robert  Puschendorf, Science 18 April 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6181 pp. 260-261 DOI: 10.1126/science.1250953 -- will be of great interest to historians of natural history.

Here are the first paragraphs of Winker's response and the link to the rest.

Karen  4/21/2014

Karen Reeds, PhD, FLS
Peter Kalm’s New Jersey, 1748-1751
NJ350 Publication Initiative grant, New Jersey Historical Commission
 karenmreeds at gmail.com<mailto:karenmreeds at gmail.com>
Princeton Research Forum, a community of independent scholars:  http://www.princetonresearchforum.org/
=====

(Re)affirming the specimen gold standard

http://www.universityofalaskamuseumbirds.org/reaffirming-the-specimen-gold-standard/

A recent opinion paper in Science by a group of authors more concerned with human ethics than with science and biodiversity used a rather broad brush to paint scientific collecting in a negative light. Perhaps through their lack of intimate familiarity with biodiversity science, they made a number of errors in their effort to urge field biologists to stop collecting voucher specimens. Setting aside the issue of why a prestigious journal like Science would publish what is a rather weak contribution, the appearance of this piece does provide an opportunity to again help people understand why scientific collecting is important, why it does not pose a threat to populations of wild organisms, and why in a time of global change adding specimens to collections is now more important than ever. There is a substantial body of peer-reviewed literature on this topic; I will just summarize some of the main points here.

Scientific collecting is important in many ways, and not just in describing and defining biodiversity. Traditional biodiversity studies continue to provide a scientific basis for the conservation and management of biodiversity, but the long-term preservation of specimens in collections enables many scientists through time to use this preserved material to ask and answer many other questions, too. And, contrary to the position expressed in this Science piece that vouchers are collected for identification purposes, the vast majority of specimens are collected for other reasons; we usually know exactly what it is we are collecting, and we are making informed judgments that balance values to science and conservation. Also, in birds, we’re operating under a considerable packet of permits usually obtained after close consultation with wildlife managers and permitting officials....




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kevin Winker <kevin.winker at alaska.edu<mailto:kevin.winker at alaska.edu>>
Date: Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 3:15 AM
Subject: [Nhcoll-l] (Re)affirming the specimen gold standard
To:


Using all available means to get the word out to quickly counter that article in Science last Friday:

http://www.universityofalaskamuseumbirds.org/reaffirming-the-specimen-gold-standard/

Best,
--
Kevin Winker
University of Alaska Museum
907 Yukon Drive
Fairbanks, AK 99775


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