What does it mean to be wild? Assessing anthropogenic environments of nonhuman primate specimens in museum collections

<p>Natural history collections are often thought to represent environments in a pristine natural state, free from human intervention – the so-called "wild". In this study, we aim to assess the level of human influence represented by natural history collections of wild-collected primates over 120 years at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Our sample consisted of 875 catarrhine primate specimens in NMNH collections, representing 13 genera collected from 39 countries (1882–2004). Using archival and accession information, we determined the approximate locations from which specimens were collected. We then plotted location coordinates onto publicly available anthrome maps created  by Ellis et al. (2010), which delineate terrestrial biomes of human population density and land use worldwide since the 1700s. We found that among primates collected from their native ranges, 92% were from an environment that had some level of human impact, suggesting that the majority of presumed wild-collected primate specimens lived in an environment influenced by humans during their lifetimes. The degree to which human-modified environments may have impacted the lives of primates currently held in museum collections has been historically ignored, implicating unforeseen consequences for collections-based research. While unique effects related to commensalism with humans remain understudied, effects currently attributed to natural phenomena may, in fact, be related to anthropogenic pressures on unmanaged populations of primates.</p>