Journal
ECOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 19, Issue 8, Pages 992-1006Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ele.12624
Keywords
Data bias; data deficiency; data uncertainty; Global Biodiversity Information Facility; Global Strategy for Plant Conservation; herbarium specimens; knowledge gaps; species distributions; survey effort; Wallacean shortfall
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Funding
- Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU)
- German Research Foundation (DFG)
- Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony
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Plants are a hyperdiverse clade that plays a key role in maintaining ecological and evolutionary processes as well as human livelihoods. Biases, gaps and uncertainties in plant occurrence information remain a central problem in ecology and conservation, but these limitations remain largely unassessed globally. In this synthesis, we propose a conceptual framework for analysing gaps in information coverage, information uncertainties and biases in these metrics along taxonomic, geographical and temporal dimensions, and apply it to all c. 370000 species of land plants. To this end, we integrated 120million point-occurrence records with independent databases on plant taxonomy, distributions and conservation status. We find that different data limitations are prevalent in each dimension. Different metrics of information coverage and uncertainty are largely uncorrelated, and reducing taxonomic, spatial or temporal uncertainty by filtering out records would usually come at great costs to coverage. In light of these multidimensional data limitations, we discuss prospects for global plant ecological and biogeographical research, monitoring and conservation and outline critical next steps towards more effective information usage and mobilisation. Our study provides an empirical baseline for evaluating and improving global floristic knowledge, along with a conceptual framework that can be applied to study other hyperdiverse clades.
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