Declines in the numbers of amateur and professional taxonomists: implications for conservation

By G. Hopkins, R. Freckleton. 2002

379 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c8d96d4f98a2b21bdd268fb28579b6976bb3d40

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In Ecological Modeling

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Environmental DNA - An emerging tool in conservation for monitoring past and present biodiversity (2015, background): “Furthermore, morphological identification is heavily dependent on taxonomic expertise, which is often lacking or in rapid decline (Hopkins and Freckleton, 2002; Wheeler et al., 2004).”
Seven Shortfalls that Beset Large-Scale Knowledge of Biodiversity (2015, background): “Including these undocumented species in the Catalogue of Life may be problematic, as new entries should be validated by an expert who has scrutinized descriptions and specimens—in many cases, although the taxonomic groups are extant, their corresponding experts are not (Hopkins & Freckleton 2002).”
Conservation and the botanist effect (2011, neutral): “Today, natural history is often thought of as a hobby (Rivas, 1997) and there is an increasing reliance on amateur taxonomists (Hopkins and Freckleton, 2002), volunteer labor (Brandon et al.”
Undisciplined thinking: morphology and Hennig’s unfinished revolution (2008, background): “Into these teams the community of amateur taxonomists should be integrated, although their numbers appear also to be declining (Hopkins & Freckleton, 2002).”
Exploiting generic platform technologies for the detection and identification of plant pathogens (2008, background): “In addition, there is a well-documented decline (e.g. Coomans 2002; Hopkins and Freckleton 2002) in the availability of experts in the field of morphological taxonomy, due at least in part to changing trends in teaching at Universities.”
What can biological barcoding do for marine biology? (2005, background): “At the same time, the number of taxonomists who are to study the remaining biodiversity is dwindling (Iseley 1972; Gaston & May 1992; Daly 1995; Buyck 1999; Lammers 1999; McAllister 2000; Hopkins & Freckleton 2002).”
MiFish metabarcoding: a high-throughput approach for simultaneous detection of multiple fish species from environmental DNA and other samples (2020, background): “2019), which is increasingly scarce and declining in availability(Hopkins and Freckleton 2002).”
Can DNA-Based Ecosystem Assessments Quantify Species Abundance? Testing Primer Bias and Biomass—Sequence Relationships with an Innovative Metabarcoding Protocol (2015, background): “In times of declining taxonomic expertise [23,24], these curated and public barcode databases are indispensible to conserve taxonomic knowledge.”
Automated plant species identification—Trends and future directions (2018, background): “With the continuous loss of biodiversity [11], the demand for routine species identification is likely to further increase, while at the same time, the number of experienced experts is limited and declining [12].”
Machine learning for image based species identification (2018, background): “Automating the task and making it feasible for non-experts is highly desirable, especially considering the continuous loss of biodiversity (Ceballos et al., 2015) and of experienced taxonomists (Hopkins & Freckleton, 2002).”
Is the insect apocalypse upon us? How to find out (2020, background): “Declines in insect identification expertise further degrade the ability to determine biodiversity and population trends for most insect lineages (Hopkins and Freckleton, 2002); growing sources of identification knowledge through community science, machine learning, and genetic barcoding are helpful,”
Monitoring endangered freshwater biodiversity using environmental DNA. (2012, background): “Such data collection is nonstandardized and dependent on practical and taxonomic expertise, which is rapidly declining (Hopkins & Freckleton 2002; Wheeler et al. 2004).”
Parataxonomy vs. taxonomy in biodiversity studies – pitfalls and applicability of ‘morphospecies’ sorting (2004, background): “The persistent decline of human resources in taxonomy (Anonymous 2000; Hopkins and Freckleton 2002) has confronted community ecologists and applied biodiversity researchers with insuperable problems.”
The role of taxonomy in species conservation. (2004, background): “The needs are particularly critical in understudied habitats (e.g. marine; Mikkelsen & Cracraft 2001), invertebrates (Gaston & May 1992; Hopkins & Freckleton 2002), marine invertebrates (Dayton 2003), tropical flora (Knapp 2002) and in the developing world (The Royal Society 2003).”
Biodiversity loss and the taxonomic bottleneck: emerging biodiversity science (2006, background): “…and training for, as well as the prestige associated with, alpha-taxonomy has been drastically eroded, a situation dubbed a taxonomic ‘‘crisis’’ or ‘‘impediment’’ (for further discussion see: Wortley et al. 2002; Hopkins and Frekleton 2002; Wheeler 2004; Wheeler et al. 2004; Sodhi et al. 2004).”