Straits Times Oct 10, 2020
Butterfly specimens from Singapore, Malaysia find new life on Web
More than 12,700 butterfly specimens from over 970 species native to Singapore and Peninsula Malaysia
were put online in the GBIF, a free international biodiversity database. They are preserved at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, collected between 1936 and 1998. Some species are extinct. It has 12,000 butterfly species to take online. It has plans to digitalise stick insect specimens. LKCNHM has the good representation of stick insect diversity within South-east Asia. This region has the highest diversity of stick insects in the world.
Butterfly species in this region are under-represented in global databses. It has 1,200 species compared with 496 in Europe.
Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia sit on the Sundaland biodiversity hotspot, one of the biologically richest places on earth.
With historical records online, scientist can do comparative studies on distribution of species, decline of species now extinct, re-introduction of these species.
by 1990, 114 butterfly species were extinct in Singapore.
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