The natural historian already has a difficult job keeping up with the millions of species of plants and insects in the world.
But the task may now be even harder following the revelation that more than half the world's natural history specimens may be wrongly named.
According to researchers at the University of Oxford and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the sheer amount of samples being collected is outpacing the number of experts who can accurately record them.
They examined 4,500 specimens of the African ginger genus Aframomum, from 40 collections in 21 countries, using a monographic study – a very detailed and thoroughly documented study – completed last year as a reference. “The team were surprised to find that prior to this monograph at least 58 percent of specimens were either misidentified, given an outdated or redundant name, or only identified to the genus or family,” according to the research, published in Current Biology magazine.
“As few plant groups have been recently monographed, the team suggests that a similar percentage of wrong names might be expected in many other groups.”
Researchers also discovered that two specimens from the same plant are often recorded differently. An analysis of 21,075 samples of Dipterocarpaceae, a family of rainforest trees from Asia, found that 29 percent had different names in different collections.
Mistakes were also found within records kept online. An examination of 560 names associated with 49,500 specimens of Ipomoea - a genus which includes the sweet potato – revealed four out of 10 were recorded as outdated synonyms rather than the current name. – and around one in seven of the names were unrecognisable or wrong.
Mistaken identity is widespread in tropical plant collections, according to the study. “This finding has serious implications for the uncritical use of specimen data from natural history collections,” the study warns.
The world's collections of tropical plant specimens have more than doubled in the past 45 years. And the “rate of increase in natural history collections across the world has greatly outpaced the ability to process, evaluate and name them correctly”.
The problem is not confined to tropical plants. “We assume that the pattern we document for flowering plants in this paper is also true and possibly worse for insects, given that the number of described insects is three times that of flowering plants.”