The value of baseline or long-term data for detecting and responding to declines in wildlife populations.

Abstract

IT would be a fair guess that few, if any, readers of Pacific Conservation Biology would have heard of Faunistische Abhandlungen Staatliches Museum für Tierkunde in Dresden (although thanks to the internet, it is possible to access some of the papers without resort to the resources of a good academic library). Even German conservation researchers are infrequent readers. Sebastian Schuch from the Georg-August-University of Göttingen and his colleagues acknowledge that it was only because of a tip from another colleague, Herbert Nickel, that they discovered an obscure but immensely valuable 1969 paper by H. Schiemenz (Faunistische Abhandlungen Staatliches Museum fur Tierkunde in Dresden 6, 201–280). Between 1963 and 1967, Schiemenz had documented meticulously the auchenorrhynchan (a sub-order of the true bugs, Hemiptera) fauna of 48 protected dry, grassland sites in Eastern Germany, and published the full data along with a detailed methodology.