National trends in closing spatiotemporal biodiversity knowledge gaps via complementary data types

Abstract:

The growing threats to global biodiversity demand understanding species status and trends in order to deploy efficient and effective conservation measures. Doing so requires detailed information on species distributions across large geographic scales, which ultimately falls on individual nations to report. Thus, determining complementarity or redundancy of datasets, identifying biodiversity information gaps, and understanding trends in data coverage over time are priorities to both scientific and political communities. Using seventy years’ (1950-2019) worth of digitally accessible species point occurrences, we investigated temporal trends in global data coverage and data efficacy for terrestrial vertebrates at the national level. Further, we demonstrate the potential of camera trapping to contribute to biodiversity science using ca. 4 million publicly available camera trap observations from the newly released Wildlife Insights (WI). We found large heterogeneity in biodiversity data coverage over the previous decade (2010-2019) among nations (mean = 0.1) and taxa (mean values, birds = 0.25, mammals = 0.03, amphibians = 0.07, reptiles = 0.05) and characterize nations by trends in coverage. While a majority (57%) of nations did not show significant trends in steward’s coverage over the previous decade, most others (42%) increased and a small minority decreased (0.5%). We identified nations, primarily in the tropics, and species, primarily small-bodied mammals, for which camera-trapping observations had the largest contribution to data coverage. Our findings provide a critical assessment of the effectiveness of biodiversity inventories over the past century to understanding rapid changes in global biodiversity.