Aspects for Improving the ABBI Patricia Escalante Instituto de Biología UNAM AOU-Collections Committee member

Scientific collections: Stronger in developed countries thanks to strategies to send collectors that became foreign residents in Neotropical countries

Scientific Collections: different kind of specimens

Frozen bird tissue collections: began in 1973 (photos from the University of Alaska Museum and the cryobats for tissues in liquid nitrogen of the American Museum of Natural History in New York)

Considerations for ABBI as a biodiversity infrastructure iniciative: Independent vouchers of barcode sequences

Proper vouchers: scientific specimens prepared according to professional standards and accessioned into systematic collections

Feathers or digital images without vouchered specimens are of less quality and weak for infrastructure.

Migratory movements in neotropical birds are not well identified yet, so vouchers and breeding individuals for barcoding are priority. Without them questionable “cryptic” species could be indentified

Independent vouchers of barcode sequences high quality vouchers are preferably breeding-locality specimens accessioned into publicly available scientific collections that appropriately preserve diagnostic features of taxa and carry full specimen data (e.g. collecting locality, date, collector, soft-part colors, body mass).

Legal documentation of specimen provenance With the Convention of Biological Diversity countries obtained jurisdiction over biodiversity resources within their frontiers

Legal documentation of specimen provenance Scientific collections have decades of experience following these regulations

Long term archival preservation of tissues and DNA extracts

Archival preservation of tissues and DNA extracts (protocols) tissues in liquid nitrogen purified DNA samples should be housed at the institutions where the specimen vouchers and raw sample tissues are housed, or minimally in an institution that is equiped to house DNA extract collections, with a clear linkage back to the original voucher specimen and associated data

Distributed structure/community effort

Data and samples should be retained by institutions that house the permanent voucher specimens Distributed structure/community effort

Scientific literature Primary Species’ Occurrence Data Recordings, images, videos Field notes, other ancillary information Stomach contents, etc. Geospatial data describing locality Parasites etc. Stable isotope data Gene sequence data Genomics Remote-sensing data showing locality in space and time Taxonomic data 5 000,000 specimens will be reachable from more that 40 institutions Distributed structure/community effort

distributed database of museum specimens and observational database the raw data is always refered to the owner institution as providers Distributed structure/community effort

Sampling design Museum-based systematists and other ornithological researchers could embrace ABBI as an opportunity to create a coordinated network of tissue collections and DNA extracts of all avian species.

In conclusion ABBI potential for learning about bird systematics –species limits, species identifications, molecular sequence variation, and phylogenies necessary cooperation from the museum community for strategies with a long term, archival, and distributed point of view. protocols that recognize the basic tenents of systematics (e.g. repeatability, vouchering) Acknowledgement for the decades-long effort of the critical tissue collections that can contribute to this collegiate effort Opportunity for joint fund raising efforts to develop high quality storage conditions for tissue collections and vouchers in megabiodiversity countries institutions