The Tropical Biodiversity Data Gap: Addressing Disparity in Global Monitoring

By B. Collen, Mala Ram, T. Zamin, L. McRae. 2008

313 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Nations around the world are required to measure their progress towards key biodiversity goals. One important example of this, the Convention on Biological Diversity's 2010 target, is soon approaching. The target set is to significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by the year 2010. However, to what extent are the data, especially for tropical countries, available to indicate biodiversity change and to what extent is current knowledge of biodiversity change truly a global picture? While species richness is greatest in the tropics, biodiversity data richness is skewed towards the poles. This not only provides a significant challenge for global indicators to accurately represent biodiversity, but also for individual countries that are responsible under such legislation for measuring their own impact on biodiversity. We examine the coverage of biodiversity data using four global biodiversity datasets, and look at how effective current efforts are at addressing this discrepancy, and what countries might be able to do in time for 2010 and beyond. We conclude by suggesting a number of activities which might provide impetus for improved biodiversity monitoring in tropical nations.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/beb126621a02d74f8fc26b4aaf565fa434dcb7c3

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Citations in the corpus

The strong influence of collection bias on biodiversity knowledge shortfalls of Brazilian terrestrial biodiversity (2016, background): “These problems are even more pronounced in the tropics (Kier et al., 2005; Collen et al., 2008), which holds most of the planet’s biodiversity.”
Odonata enter the biodiversity crisis debate: The first global assessment of an insect group (2009, background): “The data gap in tropical countries is a taxa-wide problem and does not only apply to odonata (see collen et al. 2008). invertebrates have been insufficiently represented not only when gauging the status of biodiversity but also when estimating rates of change in species status.”
Global gaps in trait data for terrestrial vertebrates (2020, background): “As a result of these factors, biodiversity data gaps tend to be greater in tropical areas (Collen et al., 2008).”
Distorted Views of Biodiversity: Spatial and Temporal Bias in Species Occurrence Data (2010, background): “However, many of these sources under-represent certain areas, in particular the speciesrich tropics [10], and owing to the trade-off between coverage and detail, they are often available only at a fairly coarse scale.”
The Wildlife Picture Index: monitoring top trophic levels (2010, background): “Collen et al. (2008) provide an in-depth analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of LPI and make recommendations to guide future development.”
Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers (2019, background): “Because the overwhelming majority of long-term surveys have been conducted in developed countries, particularly in the northern hemisphere, this review is geographically biased and does not adequately cover trends in tropical regions, where information on insect biodiversity is either incomplete or ”
The data void in modeling current and future distributions of tropical species (2011, background): “Unfortunately, we know very little about most tropical species (Collen et al., 2008).”
DNA metabarcoding in diet studies: Unveiling ecological aspects in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems (2019, background): “…for aquatic species, there is almost no geographical overlap between the studied areas and the global distribution of marine and freshwater biodiversity hotspots, which are mostly located in the tropics and southern hemisphere (Collen et al., 2008; Ramírez, Afán, Davis, & Chiaradia, 2017).”
Comparing environmental DNA metabarcoding and underwater visual census to monitor tropical reef fishes (2020, background): “Tropical ecosystems have historically been underrepresented in research (Collen et al., 2008), and increased monitoring efforts in these regions are urgently needed, particularly under ongoing global change (Barlow et al., 2018).”
Using market data and expert opinion to identify overexploited species in the wild bird trade (2015, background): “This need may be most acute in Southeast Asia, where an intense animal trade and widespread deforestation are interacting to threaten numerous endemic species (Wilcove et al., 2013).”