Photograph: A Liquidambar sheet at the Neuchâtel Herbarium — but the American species (L. styraciflua). No such record exists for Köyceğiz's own sweetgum. · Switzerland — not Köyceğiz · Neuchâtel Herbarium, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
This is the case that turns a museum from an exhibition space into an institution: a continuously updated record kept with a university, where the number of specimens added and papers served can be measured. Today the flora of Köyceğiz has no institutional reference at all. Yet there is no shortage of things to record: from some 1,700 specimens collected in the Köyceğiz-Dalyan Special Environmental Protection Area, 924 species and infraspecific taxa in 470 genera and 110 families were identified — 81 of them endemic, 20 rare.12 The fauna tells the same story: a study of sweetgum forests in Muğla counted 108 saproxylic beetle species in 33 families, 15 of them new records for the fauna of Türkiye13 — yet no reference insect collection exists in the region, and no butterfly survey specific to Köyceğiz could be found in open sources. None of the three 2025 nests of the lake's own turtle survived15; nor is there a local institution that watches and records such data on site year-round.