Sure, I don’t doubt there are others who make the same error (especially as a vast number of academic papers are written by people for whom English is their second or third language), but you won’t find the singular form “specie” accepted in any dictionary or grammar guide. And in my experience of proofreading and copy-editing, I’ve not encountered a publishing house with a stylesheet that would accept it either.
The example you give (Vârban, 2006) is written by a native speaker of Romanian, and was not published in a professional journal so won’t have been through a professional proofreading process. Indeed, opening the first page of that paper, I also see “fowering” (instead of “flowering”) and the phrase “The research were carried out…” – so I am not sure I would treat that paper as a guide for proper English.