Scope and applicability of information stored in natural history collections— a case study based on the largest museum collections of Tenebrionidae(Coleoptera) in Poland

摘要

Collections of specimens in museums of natural history constitute very rich sources of in-formation, containing data that can be analyzed in many ways and answer various types of questions. The aim of this article was to analyze the data content of three big collections of specimens of darkling beetles (Coleoptera, Tenebrionidae) and to show possible uses of different types of analysis with a specific focus to GIS-based methods. The source material was analyzed with regard to collections, species and collecting persons, using a number of aspects, both as summaries and spatial distribution analyses, such as counts of records, species, specimen localities, UTM squares, collection dates.