Research report: From legacy taxonomic records to faunal inference: Sarcophagidae (Diptera) richness and distributional patterns in the lakes region of Türkiye

A new study of flesh flies (Sarcophagidae, Diptera) in the Lakes Region of southwestern Türkiye has documented 37 species across four provinces, but its most striking finding concerns how those numbers came to exist. The research, published in BMC Zoology, shows that the richness recorded in a legacy natural-history collection is strongly shaped by how often each site was sampled over time, meaning the patterns recovered from old drawers must be read alongside an uneven collecting history.

The collection under analysis comprised 202 occurrence records and 300 preserved voucher specimens drawn from 73 source-defined sampling locations and 57 canonical locality units spanning Afyonkarahisar, Antalya, Burdur, and Isparta provinces. Of these, 201 occurrences and 299 vouchers were identified to species level, representing 37 species at 72 locations. None of the species were new to Türkiye, but the collection still carried substantial novelty at finer scales: 25 of the 37 species had no earlier qualifying published record from any of the four focal provinces, and 49 of the 52 species-by-province combinations constituted first published provincial records.

The authors set out to determine what the collection actually documents, to quantify how temporal sampling replication relates to recorded richness, and to interpret the faunal patterns within that sampling framework. Their approach combined voucher linkage, taxonomic and spatial harmonization, reconstruction of sampling history, and sensitivity analysis, a pipeline designed to make legacy material auditable rather than simply citable.

The sampling history itself proved highly uneven. Fully 80.7 percent of collection occurrences and 85.3 percent of specimens were collected in just 2014 and 2015, and 58 of the 73 source locations had only a single documented sampling date. This concentration matters because it means most sites in the dataset were visited once, leaving little way to judge whether the species recorded there reflect the local fauna or the luck of a single day’s collecting.

Statistical analysis confirmed the concern. Across the 72 locations represented by species-level identifications, richness was positively associated with the number of unique sampling dates, with a Spearman correlation of 0.610 (95 percent bootstrap confidence interval 0.451 to 0.748, n = 72, p = 1.26 × 10⁻⁸). In other words, the more often a site was sampled, the more species were recorded there, a pattern consistent with incomplete detection at lightly sampled sites.

Sensitivity tests showed the association was robust in some respects but geographically dependent. It persisted after excluding the most intensively sampled location (ρ = 0.585) and within the 2014–2015 window alone (ρ = 0.514). However, it weakened substantially after excluding Isparta province, where repeated sampling was concentrated, dropping to ρ = 0.253 with p = 0.222. The link between effort and richness therefore rests heavily on the one province where collectors returned repeatedly.

Biogeographically, the fauna was dominated by wider regional elements: Palaearctic and West Palaearctic species accounted for 22 of the 37 species, or 59.5 percent. To translate the baseline into future fieldwork, the study assigned the 72 species-level locations to four unranked resampling classes. Fifty-two locations (72.2 percent) fell into Class A, designated broad resurvey; five each (6.9 percent) into Class B (repeatability resurvey) and Class C (verification resurvey); and 10 (13.9 percent) into Class D, legacy comparison locations.

The authors conclude that the collection provides a defensible, voucher-based baseline of the documented Sarcophagidae fauna, while insisting that recorded richness must be interpreted alongside the uneven history of temporal replication. The spatial, elevational, chorological, and provincial patterns recovered from the collection are meaningful features of the verified record, they emphasize, but not standardized estimates of underlying richness.

By preserving the specimen-to-record evidence chain and making sampling structure explicit, the study converts heterogeneous legacy material into both an auditable zoological baseline and a practical framework for targeted, standardized resampling. For biodiversity researchers working from museum collections, the message is direct: the number of species a collection holds is inseparable from the number of times someone went looking.

Subject of Research: Taxonomic and distributional analysis of Sarcophagidae (flesh fly) records from the Lakes Region of southwestern Türkiye

Article Title: From legacy taxonomic records to faunal inference: Sarcophagidae (Diptera) richness and distributional patterns in the lakes region of Türkiye

Article References: Pekbey, G., Hayat, R., & Karaca, Ö. F. (2026). From legacy taxonomic records to faunal inference: Sarcophagidae (Diptera) richness and distributional patterns in the lakes region of Türkiye. BMC Zoology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40850-026-00300-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40850-026-00300-3

Keywords: Sarcophagidae, Diptera, flesh flies, biodiversity baselines, natural history collections, Türkiye, sampling effort, species richness, voucher specimens, provincial records, Palaearctic fauna, legacy