Seven Shortfalls that Beset Large-Scale Knowledge of Biodiversity

By Joaquín Hortal, Francesco de Bello, J. Diniz-Filho, Thomas Michael Lewinsohn, Jorge M. Lobo, Richard J. Ladle. 2015

1,476 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/410c200910c690e42726d1e542d20a1e296b8c2a

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In Ecological Modeling

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Global gaps in trait data for terrestrial vertebrates (2020, background): “Our work illustrates the taxonomic, spatial and phylogenetic dimensions of the knowledge gaps in trait data, termed the Raunkiæran shortfall by Hortal et al. (2015).”
Functional traits and ecosystem services in ecological restoration (2020, background): “challenging for species-rich tropical ecosystems, because the existing knowledge on functional traits is still concentrated in temperate species (Hortal et al. 2015).”
GIFT – A Global Inventory of Floras and Traits for macroecology and biogeography (2019, background): “However, taxonomic, geographical and temporal biases (Hortal et al., 2015; Meyer et al., 2016), as well as limited curation and standardization efforts and the lack of important meta-information, like, for example, the floristic status at a given location (native, non-native, naturalized, etc.”
Mapping ignorance: 300 years of collecting flowering plants in Africa (2016, background): “Finally, our findings show that using only one metric (e.g. spatial bias) may be insufficient to communicate the many shortcomings inherent to species-occurrence data (Hortal et al., 2015).”
Research trends in ecosystem services provided by insects (2017, neutral): “Knowledge on all aspects of biodiversity is typically concentrated in northern temperate regions, particularly Europe and North America (Hortal et al. 2015).”
Decoupling phylogenetic and functional diversity to reveal hidden signals in community assembly (2017, background): “Methods in Ecology and Evolution © 2017 British Ecological Society collect, rather than the most ‘functional’ ones (Hortal et al. 2015).”
Functional richness: Overview of indices and underlying concepts (2018, background): “However, many studies have demonstrated that considering just one functional trait may induce oversimplified conclusions because the major part of the ecosystemic functions cannot be summarized by a single functional trait (Villéger et al. 2008, Schleuter et al. 2010, Hortal et al. 2015).”
AVONET: morphological, ecological and geographical data for all birds. (2022, background): “Our understanding of biodiversity is ultimately limited by the availability of data in a few critical areas, including species geographical distributions (the so-called ‘Wallacean shortfall’) and traits (the ‘Raunkiæran short-fall’; Hortal et al., 2015).”
Deep learning and computer vision will transform entomology (2020, background): “These approaches can help solve long standing challenges in ecology and biodiversity research and also address pressing issues in insect population monitoring (32, 33).”
The strong influence of collection bias on biodiversity knowledge shortfalls of Brazilian terrestrial biodiversity (2016, background): “, 2005) and the lack of knowledge about the responses and tolerances of species to abiotic conditions (Hutchinsonian shortfall; Hortal et al., 2015).”
What we (don’t) know about global plant diversity (2018, positive): “Fourth, we do not know about the functional traits of many plants—this is the Raunkiæran shortfall (Hortal et al. , 2015).”