TY  - JOUR
A1  - Sampaio, Íris
A1  - Carreiro-Silva, Marina
A1  - Freiwald, André
A1  - Menezes, Gui
A1  - Grasshoff, Manfred
T1  - Natural history collections as a basis for sound biodiversity assessments: Plexauridae (Octocorallia, Holaxonia) of the Naturalis CANCAP and Tyro Mauritania II expeditions
T2  - ZooKeys
N2  - Mapping biodiversity is the marathon of the 21st Century as an answer to the present extinction crisis. A century in which science is also characterised by large scientific datasets collected through new technologies aiming to fill gaps in our knowledge of species distributions. However, most species records rely on observations that are not linked to specimens, which does not allow verification of species hypotheses by other scientists. Natural history museums form a verifiable source of biodiversity records which were made by taxonomists. Nonetheless, these museums seem to be forgotten by biologists in scientific fields other than taxonomy or systematics. Naturalis Biodiversity Center (NBC) in Leiden is care keeper of large collections of marine organisms, which were sampled in the Northeast Atlantic during the CANCAP and Tyro Mauritania II expeditions (1976–1988). Many octocorals were sampled and deposited in the NBC collection, where they became available for study and were partially identified by the senior author (M.G.) in the 1980s. Nonetheless, no checklist or taxonomic revision was published so far with the complete results. In 2016 the first author visited NBC to examine NE Atlantic Plexauridae octocorals. Plexauridae octocoral-vouchered records were listed and mapped to reveal high standard primary biodiversity records unreported so far for the NE Atlantic Ocean. Twenty-four Plexauridae species with ~ six putative new species to science were discovered and eleven new biogeographical records were made from distinct Macaronesian archipelagos. Finally, new depth range records were found for three species at sea basin level and for eight species at a regional scale.
KW  - Alcyonacea
KW  - CANCAP project
KW  - deep water
KW  - geographical distribution
KW  - Tyro Mauritania II
KW  - zoological collections
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/51009
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-510097
SN  - 1313-2970
SN  - 1313-2989
N1  - Copyright Íris Sampaio et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
VL  - 870
SP  - 1
EP  - 32
PB  - Pensoft Publishers
CY  - Sofia, Bulgaria
ER  -