ABSTRACT: Museum collections have long been valuable and essential tools for evolutionary and systematic questions. The idea of collecting vouchers has become controversial with ecologists. However, the value of museum collections to ecology has been overseen and underutilized. Among the challenges of using museum collections is that ecological inference requires large sample sizes. The application of museum collections to ecological applications can greatly expand the types of questions researchers can study. Museum vouchers are particularly important in the tropics where many species are still poorly known. Vouchers can be valuable for studies of species level variation and adaptation, populations, and biodiversity. From the perspective of biodiversity, museum specimens are extremely important for expanding the quantification of functional traits. Furthermore, surprisingly the most abundant species tend to be poorly represented in collections, which is the example for many urban species. Given the current rates of human driven habitat changes in tropical regions, the expansion of urbanization worldwide, and climate change, museum specimens will become important for long term ecological studies of a changing world. Unfortunately, the number of specimens for most species are still reactively low especially, in particular for different age groups, along landscape level gradients, and even for common and abundant species.
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