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Article

Urban Beetle Diversity in Natural History Collections—A Hundred-Year Perspective

by
Lea Ružanović
1 and
Vlatka Mičetić Stanković
2,*
1
Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, Rooseveltov trg 6, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia
2
Croatian Natural History Museum, Demetrova 1, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Diversity 2023, 15(12), 1224; https://doi.org/10.3390/d15121224
Submission received: 14 November 2023 / Revised: 12 December 2023 / Accepted: 15 December 2023 / Published: 18 December 2023
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Do We Still Need Natural History Collections?)
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Abstract

:
Natural history museum collections are essential for understanding biodiversity and environmental changes, especially in large cities with rapid urbanization. While the collaboration between curators and taxonomists with ecologists becomes more frequent, the museum collections still are not used to their full potential. This study aimed to digitize beetle specimens from Zagreb, which are kept in the Croatian Natural History Museum collections, provide recent nomenclature, analyse the proportion of currently endangered species, georeference, and compare the sampling locations with today’s iNaturalist citizen science records, as well as land cover changes between the time of collection creation and now. Comparing the sampling locations of collection specimens and citizen science records, it is possible to track the city’s expansion. Beetle family composition is more similar in the city centre than on the outskirts of Zagreb, where land cover changes are more pronounced. The districts in the northern part of Zagreb held higher numbers of threatened saproxylic beetles in both museum collections and citizen science records, highlighting the importance of urban parks and forests and providing insights into potential conservation threats. Museum collections have proved to be a valuable source of biodiversity records frozen in time, helping us track the urban beetle fauna decline.

1. Introduction

Museums present a unique source of biodiversity information and are thus recognized as an important source of data in the face of advancing climate change and accelerating biodiversity decline [1]. Museum specimens have been collected over historical periods [2,3] documenting a permanent change in nature [4] and archiving life sustainably [5]. They are fundamental for understanding life forms, changes in environmental conditions, genetic diversity, life-history traits, and evolution [3,5,6]. Thus, they can provide data on species at the temporal and spatial scales that are needed as additional information in current field surveys or conservation management [7,8]. Despite both taxonomy and natural history museums worldwide being underfunded, sidelined and undervalued, which is leading to persistent knowledge gaps [5,9], Word et al. (2015) [10] have shown that in recent years there has been a substantial increase in collaboration between curators and taxonomists with ecologists. There are some excellent works which highlight the need for the use of museum specimens in biological studies [6,11,12,13], especially within developing disciplines such as population genetics or urban ecology [14].
Urbanisation is a process through which people form dense settlements and cities [15] and it is one of the major pressures at local, regional, and global scales, rapidly changing abiotic and biotic environments over time and space [15,16,17]. Urban ecology aims to find out how human and ecological systems evolve in urban areas [18], with insects recognised as valuable components and indicators of urban biodiversity [11,19,20,21]. These areas are characterised by constant human activity [22], and changes in soil type, hydrology, vegetation, and microclimate occur, as well as habitat fragmentation and isolation [23]. To date, there are few data on urban entomology in the literature based on museum specimens and documentation, highlighting the following studies: [11,13,19].
Beetles are, with more than 450,000 species, one of the most species-rich insect orders [24] and account for as much as 38% of the total number of insect species [25]. They are numerous, highly diverse and adapted to different environmental conditions, so they are often used in conservation biology as indicators of habitat quality [26]. One ecological group that has recently come into focus are the saproxylic beetles. They are associated with decaying or dead wood throughout, or part of, their life cycle [27], play a key role in the decomposition process and in the cycling of nutrients in the ecosystem [28], and are thus considered excellent indicators of biodiversity in forest ecosystems [29]. Due to omnipresent anthropogenic impacts from excessive tree felling, saproxylic beetles are particularly endangered today [30]. The IUCN European Red List Criteria enlisted 21 families or subfamilies of saproxylic beetles, of which Cerambycidae and Elateridae are the most speciose [31]. Remarkably, the authors emphasised that the biology of many representatives is still unknown and systematic studies are urgently needed for understanding the functionality of forest ecosystems.
The City of Zagreb is the capital of the Republic of Croatia with a population of more than 750,000 [32]. The city developed from medieval settlements first documented in 1094 [33], while in the 20th century intensive urbanization significantly enlarged the city [34]. The beetles in the City of Zagreb have been studied only sporadically. There is some data on ground beetles, but in more remote areas outside the city centre, i.e., Medvednica mountain (e.g., [35]). Dražina et al. (2012) [36] conducted the only study of entomofauna in city parks to date, particularly in Maksimir Park, where they detected over 60 beetle species, 16 of which are on the European Red List of Saproxylic Beetles. One of the current popular ways of conducting the monitoring of saproxylic beetles is the inclusion of citizens through citizens science projects. Citizen science is now a growing field that enables relatively easy data collection, especially when the complexity of the information and the skill required are simple [12]. As urban ecology often requires comprehensive data from large geographical areas, citizen science can be an excellent solution due to existing logistical difficulties [37]. This approach can be very effective if the species is easily recognizable.
The Croatian Natural History Museum in Zagreb (HPM) was founded in 1846 and is one of the oldest museums in this part of Europe [38]. Its entomological collections harbour more than 700,000 specimens, including 13 collections with more than 300,000 beetle specimens. Part of the collection contains numerous beetle specimens collected in and around the present-day City of Zagreb. Löbl et al. (2023) [5] stated that the current priority of natural history museums is to digitise and analyse the specimens already in their collections. But one has to keep in mind that their identification is mostly doubtful, wrong, or outdated due to the already mentioned lack of taxonomists.
The main objective of this study was to record the beetle species sampled in the City of Zagreb, which are kept in museum collections. Other objectives were: (i) to determine the period in which the specimens were collected; (ii) to provide recent nomenclature of the specimens; (iii) to analyse the proportion of currently endangered species, with special attention to saproxylic representatives; (iv) to georeference and compare habitat type and quantity from the time of the collection creation with the same habitat today; (v) to provide a basis for future studies on urbanisation processes using museum specimens. The analysis of museum specimens as the data source for the distribution and diversity estimation of beetles in the City of Zagreb has never been performed before.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Study Area

The City of Zagreb is situated between the River Sava in the south and the Medvednica mountain in the north, with a total area of 641.32 m2, comprising of 68 settlements and 17 districts. The climate in the city is moderately warm and humid, with hot summers in which the average temperature in the hottest month is below 22 °C [39]. Kovačić (2014) pointed out that due to increasing urbanisation, which reduces the number of green spaces, heat accumulation in the city and the formation of heat islands increases. Nowadays, the share of green areas in the city is 75.1% [40], distributed across 31 areas protected by various categories of nature protection laws (e.g., NN 80/13, 15/18, 127/19). The geological bed is geologically diverse and belongs to ages ranging from the Palaeozoic to the Quaternary [41].

2.2. Museum Specimens Revision

For this study, we reviewed two collections in the HPM where most of the beetles from the area of the City of Zagreb were collected: the Central Beetles Collection together with Korlević collection (CBCK), and the Redenšek Beetles Collection (RBC). The CBCK and RBC count 36,779 and 6958 dry-mounted specimens, respectively. The CBCK was created in the mid-20th century by merging various collections to create a representative collection of the beetle specimens housed in the museum. Antun Korlević was the first professor of entomology at the University of Zagreb, while he founded a natural history museum in Rijeka with a zoological, botanical, and mineralogical collection [42]. Vladimir Redenšek was an amateur entomologist and biospeleologist, who actively promoted entomological sciences. He was an excellent collector of various beetles, especially in the City of Zagreb and in karst subterranean habitats [43].
Since the number of specimens differs greatly between the two selected collections, all specimens from the RBC were included, while for the more numerous CBCK, only saproxylic representatives were included in the study. The following data was provided (if possible): family, subfamily, genus, species, subspecies, aberration or variety, locality name, date of sampling, name of collector (legator), inventory number, number of specimens (if several specimens are mounted together). The Winkler catalogue (1924–1932) was used to read taxa names that were inaccurate or misspelled, as this catalogue was current at the time the collections were made. Subsequently, the taxa names were changed to the current nomenclature, using the current beetle’s literature [44,45,46,47,48,49,50], the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (https://www.gbif.org, accessed on 20 October 2023) [51], and Fauna Europaea (https://fauna-eu.org, accessed on 1 February 2021) [52]. It is important to note that the authors did not revise the identification of the museum specimens, as this is infeasible due to their large number and diversity.
The names of the sampling localities were also adapted to the current names by comparing the historical and recent cartographic material. Historical maps used in this study were downloaded from the digital collections repository of National and University Library in Zagreb (https://digitalna.nsk.hr, accessed on 10 October 2023) [53]. The specimens with illegible or unclearly written labels were excluded from the study.

2.3. Data Analysis

Data analysis was conducted on two data sets: the specimens from the Museum collections, and recent beetle findings in the City of Zagreb recorded on the research grade iNaturalist citizen science platform (data downloaded from GBIF: https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.8jgz4f, accessed on 20 October 2023) [54]. They were analysed from various aspects: (1). number of species per family; (2). number of specimens per year, month, decade; (3). the conservation status or risk of extinction according to the IUCN Red List Criteria. Similarity between localities was tested using the non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) method [55] in PRIMER (v. 7) [56]. This was used to visualize locality similarity based on the recorded beetle families on each locality. For this analysis, Bray–Curtis similarity was used. Localities with less than 10 individual recordings were excluded from the analysis. Prior to analysis, the data was log-transformed. Additionally, we analysed the proportion of specimens with an unclearly written locality in the overall number of specimens in the collection. Then, we analysed whether the localities from the collections are currently protected by legal procedures (e.g., list of protected areas, Ministry of Croatia).
Each locality from museum collections was georeferenced using QGIS (ver. 3.16.2) software. Questionable localities and localities outside the recent administrative borders of the City of Zagreb were excluded from the analysis. Localities were plotted on a map with Zagreb districts in order to reduce the error in assigning a spatial component to the site name. The districts in which there were museum collection records were used in further analyses. The districts that encompassed localities from the museum collections and iNaturalist dataset were then intersected with the CORINE Land Cover inventory dataset from 1980 and 2018 (WFS accessed from: http://servisi.azo.hr/tlo/wfs?service=WFS&request=GetCapabilities, 13 November 2023) in order to track land cover and land use change in sampling localities over time. Data were then plotted using Tableau (ver. 2021.3) software.
Recent and historic Zagreb city borders were defined using the GeoHub data repository (https://geohub-zagreb.hub.arcgis.com/, 13 November 2023) [57]. The definition of the currently endangered beetle representatives from both datasets was based on the European IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (https://www.iucnredlist.org, 13 November 2023) [58]. For saproxylic beetles, IUCN categories were assigned using the European Red List of Saproxylic Beetles [31].

3. Results

3.1. Faunistic Composition and Spatial Distribution

During the revision and digitisation of two selected collections, we recorded a total of 3750 beetle specimens in both CBCK and RBC collections. There were specimens with different levels of identification—from family to species. Considering only the specimens with species-level identification there were 701 species (Table S1), with 100 species recorded at all 54 point localities. All the localities found in collections are distributed across 12 Zagreb districts (Figure 1). The most represented families were Cerambycidae, with 119 species at 38 localities, followed by Scarabaeidae, with 87 species at 33 localities, and Carabidae, with 81 species at 16 localities (Tables S1 and S2). The most abundant species in collections were Alosterna tabacicolor (Degeer, 1775) (45 specimens), Phymatodes testaceus (Linnaeus, 1758) (43 specimens), and Cidnopus pilosus (Leske, 1785) (42 specimens). Localities found in the Museum collections belong to five different nature protection categories defined by the Croatian nature protection law. One locality, Medvednica, is a nature park, three localities are special reserves, one is a natural monument, one a significant landscape, and two are monuments of the park architecture.
There were 282 individual beetles recorded in the City of Zagreb present in the iNaturalist dataset. They were mainly identified at the species level, with 94 species in total, while three individuals were identified to the family level and one at the genus level. Altogether, 26 families were identified. The family with most species (20) was Cerambycidae, and the family with most records (81) was Coccinellidae. The species with the most records was Harmonia axyridis (Pallas, 1773). The beetles were found in all Zagreb City districts except one (Donja Dubrava), with the most species (37) and individuals (50) found in the Sesvete district (Figure 1).

3.2. Chronology of the Records

The beetles from the City of Zagreb in the CBCK collection were sampled in a period between the years 1815 and 1987. The highest number of specimens collected in a single year (1901) was 256. In the RBC collection, beetles were collected mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, and the last recorded year was 1958, while in the CBCK collection held most records from the 1890s and 1900s with the last beetle recorded in 1987. The number of species and the number of specimens shows similar distribution across decades and beetle collectors were present in both studied collections (Figure 2). In the CBCK collection, beetles were collected mainly in May (585 specimens), while June was the most frequent month in the RBC collection (442 specimens).
The beetles from the iNaturalist platform were recorded from 2009 up to today. The number of records grew each year, with the most records from 2022 (96). The most records were found in May (86), with the least in November (4) (S3).

3.3. Protected Species

A total of 135 species from museum collections and the iNaturalist dataset are protected when applying the IUCN Red List Criteria at the European level (Figure 3). The most common category is least concerned (LC), followed by near threatened (NT), vulnerable (VU), data deficient (DD) and endangered (EN). The two species in the endangered category are Iphthiminus italicus (Truqui, 1857) and Ropalopus ungaricus (Herbst, 1784). Among species on the IUCN Red List, there are 66 species of saproxylic representatives. The most common category among saproxylic beetles is least concerned (LC) for 52 species from seven families, then near threatened (NT) for 12 species from four families and data deficient (DD) for two species from two families (Figure 3). Threatened saproxylic beetles are predominantly found in the northern districts of Gornji Grad-Medveščak and Podsljeme both by museum collectors and citizen scientists (Figure 4).

3.4. Location Similarity

The districts with museum beetle specimens clustered into different groups in the NMDS plot with a stress value of 0.06 (Figure 5). The highest similarity of 60% was estimated for Maksimir and Gornji grad–Medveščak districts, while the similarity of 40% was estimated for three groups: central and western urban districts of Donji grad, Trnje and Črnomerec; northern districts close to and on the Medvednica slopes such as Podsljeme and Podsused–Vrapče, and district Sesvete remained ungrouped. The districts with iNaturalist records clustered differently, with Maksimir and Gornji grad–Medveščak still grouping at 60% similarity, while more districts assembled two groups at 40% similarity (Figure 5).

3.5. Change in Urban Areas over Time

In Figure 6, the recorded localities from the collections are shown on a map with different historic Zagreb city borders. On the Zagreb plan (b), the entire city was situated only north of the River Sava, which was not canalised. The southern districts were sparsely built and mostly covered with forests and agricultural areas. The same was true for the eastern districts and at the foot of the Medvednica mountain. Later, on the plan from 1956, significant changes occurred when the city expanded on the right side of the River Sava, which was now canalised.
The CORINE land cover (CLC) analysis of districts encompassing museum beetle records in the City of Zagreb revealed ten CORINE level 2 classes, four of which are in the artificial surfaces category, three in agricultural areas, two in forests and one in water bodies category (Figure 7). In 7 out of 12 districts, the dominating land cover (land cover represented with more than 50%) was artificial surfaces, in one district, it was agricultural areas, and in one forest and seminatural areas. Other districts showed more heterogeneous land cover. Districts closer to the city centre, such as Donji grad, Trešnjevka–sjever and Trnje, displayed higher percentages of artificial surfaces than districts further from the centre. Southern and eastern districts had more agricultural areas, and northern and western districts had more forests and seminatural areas (Figure 7). Beetle records from the iNaturalist platform were found in 16 Zagreb districts, of which 9 were dominated by the artificial surfaces category, while two consisted mostly of agricultural areas, and one of forests and seminatural areas. Most individuals (50) were recorded in the Sesvete district, which mostly consists of natural and seminatural areas.
This analysis clearly showed accelerated changes in the Zagreb district typology. While the districts in the city centre remain more or less unchanged since 1980, with the urban fabric dominating the landscape, changes can be seen in the districts further away from the centre. The biggest land cover change was noted in the Novi Zagreb–istok and Stenjevec districts, where the industrial, commercial and transport units (CLC12) grew larger at the expense of heterogeneous agricultural areas (CLC24) (Figure 7).
At the Trnje locality, one of the most frequent toponyms in the collections, urban fabric dominated in 1980 and persisted in 2018. It is noteworthy that Dorcus parallelipipedus (Linnaeus, 1758), now threatened with extinction, was sampled there. Another frequent site locality was Podsused, where a similar trend was observed. Saproxylic representatives were very frequent in places near Mt Medvednica, such as Tuškanac, Mikulići, Markuševec, Kraljičin zdenac, belonging to districts Črnomerec, Gornji grad–Medveščak and Podsljeme or in the largest park in Zagreb, Maksimir, where the typology of land cover also changed towards the urban fabric and the artificial areas (Figure 7). Widely known saproxylic beetle Cerambyx cerdo (Linnaeus, 1758) was sampled in the Tuškanac district, and Aromia moschata (Linnaeus, 1758) in the Markuševec district.

4. Discussion

4.1. Benefits and Biases of Museum Collections and Citizen Science Data

In the era of accelerated species richness decline and increase of urbanized habitats, natural history collections are essential for understanding and conserving biodiversity with temporal study design [3,8,9]. They can serve as a basis for studying the consequences of habitat changes or fill gaps in data on species interactions [13]. Their importance has received increasing attention in recent years, especially due to digitisation initiatives that make specimens more accessible [59]. The large number of specimens with accompanying information found in this study further confirms the need to digitise selected collections. Additionally, collaboration with scientists, especially taxonomists, is urgently needed to verify the identifications of specimens. However, the use of natural history collections for environmental change studies is still rare or limited to small areas or few species [11].
Despite being very useful in research, especially in monitoring of easily recognised species, citizen science datasets must be used carefully in distribution ranges due to their taxonomical, temporal, and geographical bias [60] as citizen scientists usually recognize more common, larger or brightly coloured species [61].
On the other hand, museum collectors showed different biases collecting mostly not easily recognizable species, but the ones matching their research interest. Kharouba et al. (2018) [11] pointed out that historical data in natural history collections are often accompanied by inconsistent geographic coverage of collection records, as they may be focused on areas near towns, railways lines, etc. These sampling locations do not necessarily reflect the environmental conditions throughout the range of a particular species. Furthermore, the specimens in the collections are mainly presence-only data, reflecting opportunistic sampling rather than monitoring of specific habitats. The same conclusion can be drawn for our study, as a total of seven collectors were recorded. Therefore, the analysis of biodiversity composition should also take into account the history of collectors, where they lived, worked, etc. Many collectors focus more on finding rare specimens and accordingly release common species for a certain area, which means that comparison of such data is not possible [62]. For this reason, it is important to emphasize that in this work, the results of the analysis and mapping of specimens from the collections show the occurrence and frequency of individual species and families in the collections, not the abundance in the environment. Sometimes, a higher number of individuals at a particular site may be the result of more frequent travel to that site by the collectors. An example of that can be seen in our study due to Vladimir Redenšek being a railway employee and dedicated mountaineer [63] so many of his record are around the railroads and Mt Medvednica slopes.

4.2. Variation in Faunistic Composition

Both studied museum collections consisted of a large species number with very few specimens recorded for each species. This number was considered even greater at the time of collection creation due to many subspecies and varieties often mistakenly recorded as species. Beetle families with the most species in the collections were mostly the ones with the most specimens. These were predominantly large and/or well researched families such as Cerambycidae, Scarabaeidae and Carabidae. Interestingly, Curculionidae were not very abundant in collections, and mostly not identified at the species level, possibly due to a lack of taxonomists specialized in this group. Despite legators independently collecting beetle specimens that match their research interest, legators of studied collections recorded almost double Cerambycidae specimens than the specimens belonging to Scarabaeidae, the second most abundant. They were also found in great numbers in almost every decade and the two most abundant species belong to this family. Finding mostly saproxylic beetles was not surprising due to legators collecting a lot in the forests of Medvednica slopes and Maksimir park where such beetles are expected [35,36].
In the iNaturalist database, there is usually one better known species in each family that is recorded in much greater number than the rest of the species in that family. The most abundant families and species were the ones made known to the public through various educational panels, or science promotive materials. This could be either because they are invasive such as Harmonia axyridis, endangered, such as Lucanus cervus (Linnaeus, 1758) or because they are common and brightly coloured, such as Rhagonycha fulva (Scopoli, 1763). Both museum collections and iNaturalist data included beetles on the European Red List of Saproxylic Beetles which further showed the importance of forests and seminatural areas such as parks in urban areas, as many of them were found in such habitats both in collections and today.

4.3. Change in Habitat

Urbanization is a localized form of accelerated global change [13], leading to areas of increased pollution, greater habitat fragmentation and warmer temperatures [64]. This study has revealed the diversity of beetles in the City of Zagreb over the last 130 years. Using this data, we were able to estimate how the city’s environment has changed over the century. Ground beetles are the most widespread representatives, as expected, since this family is one of the most species-rich beetle families with many cosmopolitan representatives [65]. They are found in typically remote forest habitats (e.g., Mt Medvednica) as well as along the Sava River or in habitats near the city centre. A comparison of city maps showed the decrease of green areas and urban expansion over the years, as well as the presence of many representatives, especially saproxylic species, in today’s industrial habitats.
Even more, today’s highly urbanized districts used to have a similar beetle fauna as the more remote districts on the slopes of Mt Medvednica. For example, districts close to the city centre today, such as Donji grad and Trnje, showed a similarity with Črnomerec, which was also covered in urban fabric during beetle collection making. Today, these districts are grouped with those considered urban today, such as Novi Zagreb and Dubrava, but were not part of the urban fabric 100 years ago. Districts with seminatural areas of city parks and urban forests showed similarity in beetle family composition 100 years ago as well as today, pointing out the importance of such habitats in urban areas. Also, the Sesvete district, which is not covered by urban fabric even today, showed to be different from all other districts both 100 years ago and now, further indicating that beetles respond to land cover changes quite quickly, and their composition remains similar if the habitat is unchanged [66,67]. The locality where the landfill is located today, Jakuševac, in the Peščenica–Žitnjak district, also used to be like the latter localities. Moreover, uncontrolled waste disposal began there in 1965, and in 1995 the area occupied 80 ha. In 2000, the volume of disposed waste amounted to 8 million cubic metres. Unfortunately, due to the neglect of the landfill problem, it has become the largest unorganized waste disposal site in the southeastern part of Europe [68].

4.4. Potential Future Use of Museum Collections and Citizen Science Data

Citizen science proved to be an excellent method to collect data for specific species, especially for localities closer to the city centre [37]. When records of the occurrence of museum specimens are combined with supplementary information such as land cover or data generated by citizen science projects, unique insights into the scale and mechanisms of species range shifts and habitat change, including in urban areas, emerge [3].
One thing that museum collectors and citizen scientists performed similarly was sample beetles from April to October when the beetles are most abundant and diverse due to their biology and the seasonality of their life cycle [69]. This highlights another potential use of museum collections and citizen science data in tracking the seasonality of certain species to identify any life cycle shifts (e.g., [70,71,72]).

5. Conclusions

Educating young scholars about the importance of natural history collections and the need to ensure that the information they carry is complete and correct, are necessary for future studies. Urbanisation should be studied more intensively, as it is one of the most important impacts on the environment today [3]. This study provides a basis for future studies of insect fauna in urban areas, especially in this part of Europe. The next step of this study should be an up-to-date sampling of the beetle fauna in the same habitats, applying the current IUCN categories for many representatives [31].

Supplementary Materials

The following supporting information can be downloaded at: https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/d15121224/s1, Table S1: List of species according to recent nomenclature found in the Central Beetles Collection together with Korlević Collection and the Redenšek Beetles Collection of the Croatian Natural History Museum; Table S2: List of families found in the Central Beetles Collection together with Korlević Collection and the Redenšek Beetles Collection of the Croatian Natural History Museum with the locations where they were found.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, V.M.S.; methodology, L.R. and V.M.S.; validation, L.R. and V.M.S.; formal analysis, L.R. and V.M.S.; investigation, L.R. and V.M.S.; resources, V.M.S.; data curation, L.R.; writing, review and editing, L.R. and V.M.S.; visualization, L.R.; supervision, V.M.S.; project administration, V.M.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

The museum collection data presented in this study are available in the supplementary material here and publicly available datasets can be found here: https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.8jgz4f (accessed on 20 October 2023).

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Sebastian Janko for technical support.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Figure 1. Spatial distribution of beetle recordings from the Croatian Natural History Museum and iNaturalist dataset across the districts of the City of Zagreb. Locality codes: 1 Brezovica, 2 Črnomerec, 3 Donja Dubrava, 4 Donji grad, 5 Gornja Dubrava, 6 Gornji grad–Medveščak, 7 Maksimir, 8 Novi Zagreb–istok, 9 Novi Zagreb–zapad, 10 Peščenica–Žitnjak, 11 Podsljeme, 12 Podsused–Vrapče, 13 Sesvete, 14 Stenjevec, 15 Trešnjevka–jug, 16 Trešnjevka–sjever, 17 Trnje.
Figure 1. Spatial distribution of beetle recordings from the Croatian Natural History Museum and iNaturalist dataset across the districts of the City of Zagreb. Locality codes: 1 Brezovica, 2 Črnomerec, 3 Donja Dubrava, 4 Donji grad, 5 Gornja Dubrava, 6 Gornji grad–Medveščak, 7 Maksimir, 8 Novi Zagreb–istok, 9 Novi Zagreb–zapad, 10 Peščenica–Žitnjak, 11 Podsljeme, 12 Podsused–Vrapče, 13 Sesvete, 14 Stenjevec, 15 Trešnjevka–jug, 16 Trešnjevka–sjever, 17 Trnje.
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Figure 2. Upper heatmap: Number of beetle species across the decades recorded by each collector from the studied Croatian Natural History Museum collections. Lower heatmap: Number of beetle species across the decades recorded by each collector from the studied Croatian Natural History Museum collections. Years signify the first year of the presented decade. N/A = Not applicable.
Figure 2. Upper heatmap: Number of beetle species across the decades recorded by each collector from the studied Croatian Natural History Museum collections. Lower heatmap: Number of beetle species across the decades recorded by each collector from the studied Croatian Natural History Museum collections. Years signify the first year of the presented decade. N/A = Not applicable.
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Figure 3. Number of species from the Croatian Natural History Museum collections and iNaturalist dataset recorded in the City of Zagreb on the IUCN Red List of threatened species (first row); IUCN Red List of saproxylic beetles (second row). Abbreviations: DD—Data deficient, EN—Endangered, LC—Least concern, NT—Near threatened, VU—Vulnerable.
Figure 3. Number of species from the Croatian Natural History Museum collections and iNaturalist dataset recorded in the City of Zagreb on the IUCN Red List of threatened species (first row); IUCN Red List of saproxylic beetles (second row). Abbreviations: DD—Data deficient, EN—Endangered, LC—Least concern, NT—Near threatened, VU—Vulnerable.
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Figure 4. Spatial distribution of beetle records from museum collections and on the iNaturalist platform also present on the European Red List of Saproxylic Beetles. Locality codes: 1 Brezovica, 2 Črnomerec, 3 Donja Dubrava, 4 Donji grad, 5 Gornja Dubrava, 6 Gornji grad–Medveščak, 7 Maksimir, 8 Novi Zagreb–istok, 9 Novi Zagreb–zapad, 10 Peščenica–Žitnjak, 11 Podsljeme, 12 Podsused–Vrapče, 13 Sesvete, 14 Stenjevec, 15 Trešnjevka–jug, 16 Trešnjevka–sjever, 17 Trnje.
Figure 4. Spatial distribution of beetle records from museum collections and on the iNaturalist platform also present on the European Red List of Saproxylic Beetles. Locality codes: 1 Brezovica, 2 Črnomerec, 3 Donja Dubrava, 4 Donji grad, 5 Gornja Dubrava, 6 Gornji grad–Medveščak, 7 Maksimir, 8 Novi Zagreb–istok, 9 Novi Zagreb–zapad, 10 Peščenica–Žitnjak, 11 Podsljeme, 12 Podsused–Vrapče, 13 Sesvete, 14 Stenjevec, 15 Trešnjevka–jug, 16 Trešnjevka–sjever, 17 Trnje.
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Figure 5. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) using Bray–Curtis similarity showing Zagreb districts with beetle recordings from the (a) Croatian Natural History Museum collections; (b) iNaturalist platform.
Figure 5. Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) using Bray–Curtis similarity showing Zagreb districts with beetle recordings from the (a) Croatian Natural History Museum collections; (b) iNaturalist platform.
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Figure 6. (a) Spatial distribution of beetle recordings from the Croatian Natural History Museum, plotted on the historical maps of City of Zagreb. City of Zagreb plan from (b) 1898; (c) 1956.
Figure 6. (a) Spatial distribution of beetle recordings from the Croatian Natural History Museum, plotted on the historical maps of City of Zagreb. City of Zagreb plan from (b) 1898; (c) 1956.
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Figure 7. Area (%) of each CORINE land cover category (level 2) for each district in the City of Zagreb with beetle records from the Croatian Natural History Museum (underlined) and iNaturalist dataset (all districts) in 1980 (upper row) and 2018 (lower row).
Figure 7. Area (%) of each CORINE land cover category (level 2) for each district in the City of Zagreb with beetle records from the Croatian Natural History Museum (underlined) and iNaturalist dataset (all districts) in 1980 (upper row) and 2018 (lower row).
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Ružanović, L.; Mičetić Stanković, V. Urban Beetle Diversity in Natural History Collections—A Hundred-Year Perspective. Diversity 2023, 15, 1224. https://doi.org/10.3390/d15121224

AMA Style

Ružanović L, Mičetić Stanković V. Urban Beetle Diversity in Natural History Collections—A Hundred-Year Perspective. Diversity. 2023; 15(12):1224. https://doi.org/10.3390/d15121224

Chicago/Turabian Style

Ružanović, Lea, and Vlatka Mičetić Stanković. 2023. "Urban Beetle Diversity in Natural History Collections—A Hundred-Year Perspective" Diversity 15, no. 12: 1224. https://doi.org/10.3390/d15121224

APA Style

Ružanović, L., & Mičetić Stanković, V. (2023). Urban Beetle Diversity in Natural History Collections—A Hundred-Year Perspective. Diversity, 15(12), 1224. https://doi.org/10.3390/d15121224

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