A little over two years ago, Matt Forister, Foundation and Trevor J. McMinn Endowed Research Professor in Biology, had an idea. He was reviewing a grant application in which a student wanted to study a butterfly that hadn't been seen by entomologists for some time. Forister wondered why he was learning about this butterfly in this way, then realized there was nowhere to publish about animals or species that hadn't been seen. He set out to change that.
Forister, who is also a curator in the Museum of Natural History, decided to launch the , which would serve as a record of the contemporary biodiversity crisis. A "lost" species is one which hasn't been recorded in at least ten years. Lost species may be extinct, but they also may not be. The journal addresses a critical gap by keeping track of what we know about lost or extinct species, and what can happen when those species are found.
Forister, who serves as the editor-in-chief of the journal, said the Journal of Lost Species is an inherently optimistic endeavor. By providing a central venue for all the search efforts of various species to aggregate, more effective searches can be undertaken. Rediscoveries, the ultimate goal, will also be reported in the journal.
Re:wild, a wildlife conservation organization, launched the which organizes expeditions to find species lost to science (Re:wild estimates there are over 4,000 such species). They’ve been .
“It’s important to look back through records, or to talk to communities that have lived alongside species to understand if perhaps that species has always been rare, or if maybe it simply lives in an understudied place,” Benjamin Barca, exploration program manager at Re:wild, said. “If we don’t occasionally question why a species has not had a sighting in years, decades, or in some extreme cases more than a century, we will miss opportunities to help it if it is in trouble.”
Forister also hopes the journal will be more representative of the global scale of the extinction crisis. The journal will publish papers in English but will have abstracts in the language native to the region that the article’s species was from, if the paper’s authors provide one. is from Jordan, with the abstract in Arabic and English. The journal encourages the use of artificial intelligence for translation to maximize submission opportunities and reduce language barriers.
In the hopes that readership extends beyond the ivory tower, Forister and his editorial colleagues also welcome submissions from land managers, amateur naturalists, community scientists and anyone else who takes an interest in lost species, allowing the journal to share information about extinction, rediscovery and everything in between.
“If you can use iNaturalist, you can write a paper,” Forister said.
The journal is completely open access for readers and the nonprofit journal doesn’t charge fees for publishing. Forister said that scientists have quickly signed up to review papers for the journal, decreasing the review time that he’s become accustomed to with larger for-profit publishers. He has a feeling that the journal’s approach to publishing open access plays a role.
“We’re creating a community of people that are interested in finding things that are on the verge of extinction,” Forister said.
That community is eager to contribute to the cause. The list of handling editors includes 55 experts, several of whom are members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission. The journal will be published on an annual basis, with the first volume being published at the end of the year. Along with Re:wild, collaborators include the University’s Museum of Natural History and the Tahoe Institute for Global Sustainability.
For Forister, much of this work is an ethical obligation to the species we have lost, particularly as a result of anthropogenic changes.
“Let's make a record of the natural history and what they looked like because that's intrinsically valuable,” he said. The opportunity to find species is also a strong motivator. “I think people need optimism.”
