What we (don’t) know about global plant diversity

By William K. Cornwell, W. Pearse, R. Dalrymple, A. Zanne. bioRxiv, 2018

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rationale The era of big biodiversity data has led to rapid, exciting advances in theoretical and applied biological, ecological and conservation sciences. While large genetic, geographic and trait databases are available, these are neither complete nor random samples of the globe. Biases in species absence in these databases create problems, reducing our inferential and predictive power. Methods We performed a comprehensive examination of the taxonomic and spatial sampling in the most complete current databases for plant genes, locations, and traits. Results Only 17.7% of the world’s described land plants feature in all three databases, meaning that more than 82% of plant biodiversity lacks representation in at least one database. Species coverage is highest for location data and lowest for genetic data. Bryophytes and orchids stand out taxonomically and the equatorial region stands out spatially as poorly represented in all databases. Conclusion We have highlighted a number of clades and regions about which we know little functionally, spatially and genetically, on which we should set research targets. The scientific community should recognize and reward the significant value, both for biodiversity science and conservation, of filling in these gaps in our knowledge of the plant tree of life.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8384bb7a725edaf6c7d8526e588d483875b5daa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Global Root Traits (GRooT) Database (2020, background): “Moreover, although GRooT contains global data with a wide geographical range, the species coverage in South America and Africa remains limited irrespective of trait type, reflecting overall biases in global ecological observations (Cornwell et al., 2019; Martin et al., 2012).”