Looking to the past to understand the future of tropical conservation: The importance of collecting basic data

Abstract

AbstractTropical biodiversity is under threat from a wide variety of anthropogenic stressors. Understanding the effect of major stressors—most notably land use change, over‐harvesting, emergence of novel pathogens, and climate change—is a major goal of tropical biology. However, to do so requires baseline data with which to compare present‐day patterns. Unfortunately, the tropics suffer from a lack of basic historical data; the few studies which have published such data have proven invaluable. In 1989, Fauth et al. described their studies of reptile and amphibian diversity and population demographics across tropical elevational gradients in Costa Rica. Since then, Fauth et al.'s basic ecological data have been widely used to document shifting patterns of species composition and abundance. Here, 30 years later, we argue that (a) collecting foundational ecological data remains incredibly important, especially in the tropics, and especially in those taxa which are generally understudied (e.g., reptiles and amphibians), (b) despite being one of the original goals of the 1989 study, the mechanisms driving biogeographical patterns of diversity remain unclear (both in the tropics and globally), and (c) that revisiting sites of historic biodiversity surveys—particularly those along gradients of environmental change—is incredibly important to our understanding of how tropical diversity is currently, and will continue to be, affected by activities in the Anthropocene. In its simplest terms, there has never been a time where the collection of basic data in the tropics has ever been more important.