ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
Shifted distribution baselines: neglecting long-term biodiversity records risks overlooking potentially suitable habitat for conservation management.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Persistence Vulnerability of the African Savanna ElephantEcology and evolution · 2026Article
- Predicting the distribution ofFrontiers in plant science · 2026Article
- Challenging 10 misconceptions in conservation physiology.Conservation physiology · 2026Article
- New Perspectives on European Wildcat (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Morphometric characterization of Holocene mandibles expands the ecological baseline for understanding gibbon extinction dynamics.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Preventing extinction in an age of species migration and planetary change.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2024Article
- Analyzing the distribution patterns and dynamic niche ofFrontiers in plant science · 2024Article
- An invasive pathogen drives directional niche contractions in amphibians.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Ecological marginalization is widespread and increases extinction risk in mammals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- A novel trophic cascade between cougars and feral donkeys shapes desert wetlands.The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- Vulnerability to climate change of species in protected areas in Thailand.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Relationships between survival and habitat suitability of semi-aquatic mammals.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Unshifting the baseline: a framework for documenting historical population changes and assessing long-term anthropogenic impacts.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Anthropocene refugia: integrating history and predictive modelling to assess the space available for biodiversity in a human-dominated world.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Insights from the past: unique opportunity or foreign country?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Exploring snake occurrence records: Spatial biases and marginal gains from accessible social media.PeerJ · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Setting appropriate conservation measures to halt the loss of biodiversity requires a good understanding of species' habitat requirements and potential distribution. Recent (past few decades) ecological data are typically used to estimate and understand species' ecological niches. However, historical local extinctions may have truncated species-environment relationships, resulting in a biased perception of species' habitat preferences. This may result in incorrect assessments of the area potentially available for their conservation. Incorporating long-term (centuries-old) occurrence records with recent records may provide better information on species-environment relationships and improve the modelling and understanding of habitat suitability. We test whether neglecting long-term occurrence records leads to an underestimation of species' historical niche and potential distribution and identify which species are more vulnerable to this effect. We compare outputs of species distribution models and niche hypervolumes built using recent records only with those built using both recent and long-term (post-1500) records, for a set of 34 large mammal species in South Africa. We find that, while using recent records only is adequate for some species, adding historical records in the analyses impacts estimates of the niche and habitat suitability for 12 species (34%) in our dataset, and that this effect is significantly higher for carnivores. These results show that neglecting long-term biodiversity records in spatial analyses risks misunderstanding, and generally underestimating, species' niches, which in turn may lead to ill-informed management decisions, with significant implications for the effectiveness of conservation efforts. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The past is a foreign country: how much can the fossil record actually inform conservation?'
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.