Senior curator Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vlatka Mičetić Stanković published a paper in the journal Diversity
Senior curator Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vlatka Mičetić Stanković, in co-authorship with her colleague Lea Ružanović, mag. oecol., published a paper on the beetles of our Museum as sources of valuable information in the study of the urbanization of the City of Zagreb.
The paper was published in the high-impact journal Diversity.
Natural history museum collections are important for understanding biodiversity and environmental changes, especially in large cities where intensive urbanization is present.
Although cooperation between curators and taxonomists with ecologists is becoming increasingly common, museum collections are still not being used to their full potential.
The aim of this research was to digitize beetle insect specimens collected in the area of today’s City of Zagreb and preserved in the collections of the Croatian Natural History Museum.
The aim was also to adapt species names to current nomenclature, analyze the share of currently endangered species, georeference them and compare sampling locations with today’s citizen science reporting platform, iNaturalist, as well as analyze changes in land-cover type between the time the collection was created and the present.
By comparing sampling sites from the collections and citizen reports, it is possible to trace how the city expanded throughout history.
The composition of beetle species is more similar in the city center than on the outskirts of Zagreb, where changes in land cover are more pronounced.
Districts in the northern part of Zagreb had a higher presence of currently endangered saproxylic beetles, highlighting the importance of urban parks and forests and providing insight into the importance of preserving them.
Museum collections have proven to be a valuable source of information on biodiversity frozen in time, helping us in today’s efforts to preserve biological diversity in general, including biodiversity in cities.
You can read the article at this link.