Abstract
Rediscoveries of species previously thought to be extinct present a dilemma to conservation biology. On one hand, such instances offer the chance to change the course of events away from one that would have led to extinctions. On the other hand, public support for conservation may wane if scientists are frequently seen to overstate and prematurely declare extinctions. Recent studies have adopted a probabilistic approach to infer extinction, using sightings or collections and statistical models to calculate the chance that a species may still be extant. We conduct the first broad-scale test of such models using a recently compiled national red list and national herbarium collection records, including collections of presumed nationally extinct species made after the red list publication, which constitute “rediscoveries”. There was little evidence that the probabilities calculated by these models were associated with rediscoveries over a 3.5-year period. Current probabilistic models of extinction using sighting records could hence be inadequate for use with most natural history collection data.
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Acknowledgments
K.Y.C. is grateful to the Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, for sponsoring the conference expenses. We thank Wong Khoon Meng and the reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank the Singapore Botanic Gardens Herbarium and the National Parks Board (Singapore) for access to the collections database, and Jeremy Woon for facilitating the Research Permits (RP977 and RP943).
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Chong, K.Y., Lee, S.M.L., Gwee, A.T. et al. Herbarium records do not predict rediscovery of presumed nationally extinct species. Biodivers Conserv 21, 2589–2599 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-012-0319-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-012-0319-x