Museum and herbarium collections for biodiversity research in Angola

The importance of museum and herbarium collections is especially great in biodiverse countries such as Angola, an importance as great as the challenges facing the effective and sustained management of such facilities. The interface that Angola represents between tropical humid climates and semi-desert and desert regions creates conditions for diverse habitats with many rare and endemic species. Museum and herbarium collections are essential foundations for scientific studies, providing references for identifying the components of this diversity, as well as serving as repositories of material for future study. In this review we summarise the history and current status of museum and herbarium collections in Angola and of information on the specimens from Angola in foreign collections. Finally, we provide examples of the uses of museum and herbarium collections, as well as a roadmap towards strengthening the role of collections in biodiversity knowledge generationinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Global change in microcosms: Environmental and societal predictors of land cover change on the Atlantic Ocean Islands

10.1016/j.ancene.2020.100242Anthropocene30100242-10024

The taxonomic impediment: A shortage of taxonomists, not the lack of technical approaches

For almost 30 years, there have been active discussions about the taxonomic impediment and the challenge this represents to address the current human-induced biodiversity crisis. From the start (Systematics Agenda 2000, 1994), the term ‘taxonomic impediment’ has been ambiguous, designating both the insufficiency and inadequacy of the resources put to the service of taxonomy (the taxonomic impediment sensu stricto) and its main consequence, the wide discrepancy between the reality of specific biodiversity and our knowledge of it (the taxonomic gap; Dubois, 2010; Raposo et al., 2020). The total number of species on our planet is unknown, and its various estimates (using different methods) are widely divergent, but consensus exists that we are far from having inventoried half, and most likely one-tenth, of the species still present on earth today (González-Oreja, 2008)