What does it mean to be wild? Assessing human influence on the environments of nonhuman primate specimens in museum collections

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 in 39 countries from 1882 to 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...