ArticleNature ecology & evolution2023
Mass production of unvouchered records fails to represent global biodiversity patterns.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Modeling the effects of climate risk on primates globally: New perspectives on conservation priorities.Science advances · 2026Article
- Harnessing the benefits of herbarium specimen digitisation for inferring recent and ongoing plant extinctions.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Using herbarium collections to study genetic responses to global change.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Climate and regional plant richness drive diet specialization in butterfly caterpillars.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Patterns in the distribution of Ecuadorian amphibian type localities.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Degradation of fish food webs in the Anthropocene.Science advances · 2026Article
- Mapping Biodiversity Through Time and Space: Patterns and Drivers of Fabaceae Collection in Mozambique.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
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- Gaps in trait data and conservation impediments from the Raunkiæran shortfall in a megadiverse nation.iScience · 2025Article
- Global sampling decline erodes science potential of natural history collections.Nature communications · 2025Article
- eDNA surveys substantially expand known geographic and ecological niche boundaries of marine fishes.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Natural History Collections at the Crossroads: Shifting Priorities and Data-Driven Opportunities.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- iNaturalist and Structured Mammal Surveys Reflect Similar Species Richness but Capture Different Species Pools Across the United States.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Mapping the Missing: Assessing Amphibian Sampling Completeness and Overlap With Global Protected Areas.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Occupancy of Urban Habitats by the Jersey Tiger Moth Is Revealed by Social Media Data but Not Traditional Monitoring.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- A global biogeographic regionalization for butterflies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Climate change alters the future of natural floristic regions of deep evolutionary origins.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Biodiversity in times of conflict.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ever-increasing human footprint even in very remote places on Earth has inspired efforts to document biodiversity vigorously in case organisms go extinct. However, the data commonly gathered come from either primary voucher specimens in a natural history collection or from direct field observations that are not traceable to tangible material in a museum or herbarium. Although both datasets are crucial for assessing how anthropogenic drivers affect biodiversity, they have widespread coverage gaps and biases that may render them inefficient in representing patterns of biodiversity. Using a large global dataset of around 1.9 billion occurrence records of terrestrial plants, butterflies, amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals, we quantify coverage and biases of expected biodiversity patterns by voucher and observation records. We show that the mass production of observation records does not lead to higher coverage of expected biodiversity patterns but is disproportionately biased toward certain regions, clades, functional traits and time periods. Such coverage patterns are driven by the ease of accessibility to air and ground transportation, level of security and extent of human modification at each sampling site. Conversely, voucher records are vastly infrequent in occurrence data but in the few places where they are sampled, showed relative congruence with expected biodiversity patterns for all dimensions. The differences in coverage and bias by voucher and observation records have important implications on the utility of these records for research in ecology, evolution and conservation research.
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Registered trials
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