Global drivers of species variation in mobilized point-occurrence information
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Abstract
Despite the central role of species distributions in ecology and conservation, occurrence information remains geographically and taxonomically incomplete and biased. Numerous socio-economic and ecological drivers of uneven record collection and mobilization among species have been suggested, but the generality of their effects remains untested. We develop scale-independent metrics of range coverage and geographical record bias, and apply them to 2.8M point-occurrence records of 3,625 mammal species to evaluate 13 putative drivers of species-level variation in data availability. We find that data limitations are mainly linked to range size and shape, and the geography of socio-economic conditions. Surprisingly, species attributes related to detection and collection probabilities, such as body size or diurnality, are much weaker predictors of the amount and range coverage of available records. Our results highlight the need to prioritize range-restricted species and to address the key socio-economic drivers of data bias in data mobilization efforts and distribution modeling.
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2015. Global drivers of species variation in mobilized point-occurrence information. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1218v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1218v2Author comment
This manuscript is currently submitted to another journal. Version 2 of the preprint has spelling mistakes corrected.
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Competing Interests
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Carsten Meyer conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Walter Jetz conceived and designed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Robert P Guralnick conceived and designed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Susanne A Fritz conceived and designed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Holger Kreft conceived and designed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Funding
Funding was provided by the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Universitätsbund Göttingen (C.M.). Support for W.J. and R.P.G. came from NSF (DBI 0960550, DEB 1026764, DEB1441737, DBI-1262600), NASA (NNX11AP72G) and the Yale Program in Spatial Biodiversity Science and Conservation. Support for S.A.F. came from the LOEWE funding program of Hesse's Ministry of Higher Education, Research, and the Arts. Funding for H.K. came from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the framework of the German Excellence Initiative within the Free Floater Program at the University of Göttingen. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
