ArticleNature ecology & evolution2023
Unveiling global species abundance distributions.
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 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Global relationships between body size and urban affinity across more than 30,000 plant and animal species.eLife · 2026Article
- Spatial overlap and temporal synchrony between guilds of insect hosts and parasitoids.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Host-linked virome assembly and turnover predict bacterial community structure in wastewater treatment systems.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- General laws of biodiversity: Climatic niches predict plant range size and ecological dominance globally.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Common to rare transfer learning (CORAL) enables inference and prediction for a quarter million rare Malagasy arthropods.Nature methods · 2025Article
- Microbes Under Climate Refugia: Equable Subcommunity Rank Dynamics in Large-River Deltaic Estuaries.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Dominant species predict plant richness and biomass in global grasslands.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Myochromella unveiled: exploring its global distribution through a public database of amplicons.BMC microbiology · 2025Article
- High-throughput biodiversity surveying sheds new light on the brightest of insect taxa.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Use of cover data to model species abundance distributions through continuous probability functions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Resolving biology's dark matter: species richness, spatiotemporal distribution, and community composition of a dark taxon.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Disentangling drivers of mudflat intertidal DOM chemodiversity using ecological models.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Macroecological correlates of Darwinian shortfalls across terrestrial vertebrates.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Towards holistic insect monitoring: species discovery, description, identification and traits for all insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- An evolutionary case for plant rarity:Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Using citizen science data for predicting the timing of ecological phenomena across regions.Bioscience · 2024Article
- Temperature extremes nip invasive macrophyteFrontiers in plant science · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Whether most species are rare or have some intermediate abundance is a long-standing question in ecology. Here, we use more than one billion observations from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility to assess global species abundance distributions (gSADs) of 39 taxonomic classes of eukaryotic organisms from 1900 to 2019. We show that, as sampling effort increases through time, the shape of the gSAD is unveiled; that is, the shape of the sampled gSAD changes, revealing the underlying gSAD. The fraction of species unveiled for each class decreases with the total number of species in that class and increases with the number of individuals sampled, with some groups, such as birds, being fully unveiled. The best statistical fit for almost all classes was the Poisson log-normal distribution. This strong evidence for a universal pattern of gSADs across classes suggests that there may be general ecological or evolutionary mechanisms governing the commonness and rarity of life on Earth.
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