A JOURNEY THROUGH THE AMPHIBIAN AND REPTILE COLLECTIONS AT THE INSTITUTO HUMBOLDT IN COLOMBIA

Abstract

Biological collections are an important resource for exploring life and understanding the morphology, evolution, ecology, function, and even interactions of organisms across both temporal and spatial scales. Here we highlight the value of the amphibian and reptile specimens housed at the Instituto Humboldt in Colombia, along with their associated data, by evaluating the taxonomic and geographic coverage of both collections within a national context and by assessing the temporal trends of both voucher specimens and extended specimens. Furthermore, we explore the use of specimens and their associated data in scientific studies by performing systematic searches of published papers on Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and GBIF. We identified that both collections include more than 65 % of the amphibian and reptile species recorded across the 32 departments of Colombia, highlighting the Amazonas Department as the richest in terms of species representativeness in the collections. Growth trends for both biological collections were heterogeneous in time, showing a peak during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as over the last decade during which the number of voucher specimens and extended collections (e.g., tissues and sound recordings) substantially increased. Finally, we reviewed a total of 112 published articles that have used specimens from the Instituto Humboldt collections and found that the most represented research topics were distribution, taxonomy and systematics. Overall, this study provides valuable insights to help guide new future research directions for the reptile and amphibian collections housed at the Instituto Humboldt, focused, for example, in ecology, toxicologý and conservation, while more froadly contributing to the state of knowledge of biological collections in Colombia. We aim to encourage other national and Latin American collections to explore their data in order to help guide future efforts in a complementary and collaborative way.