Abstract
Studying and protecting each and every living species on Earth is a major challenge of the 21st century. Yet, most species remain unknown or unstudied, while others attract most of the public, scientific and government attention. Although known to be detrimental, this taxonomic bias continues to be pervasive in the scientific literature, but is still poorly studied and understood. Here, we used 626 million occurrences from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the biggest biodiversity data portal, to characterize the taxonomic bias in biodiversity data. We also investigated how societal preferences and taxonomic research relate to biodiversity data gathering. For each species belonging to 24 taxonomic classes, we used the number of publications from Web of Science and the number of web pages from Bing searches to approximate research activity and societal preferences. Our results show that societal preferences, rather than research activity, strongly correlate with taxonomic bias, which lead us to assert that scientists should advertise less charismatic species and develop societal initiatives (e.g. citizen science) that specifically target neglected organisms. Ensuring that biodiversity is representatively sampled while this is still possible is an urgent prerequisite for achieving efficient conservation plans and a global understanding of our surrounding environment.
Highlights
Since the first Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, biodiversity and the consequences of its destruction have become a central concern for biologists[1,2,3]
To investigate the relative impact of ‘societal preferences’ and ‘taxonomic research’ on biodiversity data, we used the number of webpages from Bing searches and the number of publications retrieved from Web of Science, as proxies, respectively
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) portal was chosen because it hosts the biggest open access primary biodiversity database and, even though the big data paradigm does not mean that big datasets are devoid of flaws, they offer a significant potential for new and broad insights[29]
Summary
Since the first Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, biodiversity and the consequences of its destruction have become a central concern for biologists[1,2,3]. Some organisms – mostly plants and vertebrates – are over-represented in various scientific fields[7, 9, 10], are more likely to raise funds[11], or are considered ecologically more important than others[12] It has been shown, that focusing on a few, often charismatic, species, prevents reaching global conclusions and developing efficient conservation plans[7, 13, 14]. Open access primary biodiversity data are heterogeneous, resulting from the good will of contributors and not from a well-planned sampling protocol[30], they reflect our knowledge and practices in the study of biodiversity They can be used to investigate taxonomic bias on a large geographical and taxonomic scale
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