ArticleeLife2023
Drivers of species knowledge across the tree of life.
Article in eLife, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 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.
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
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Taxonomic Bias Persists in Ecology and Evolution Research Despite Decades of Concern.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Drivers of Taxonomic Bias in Ecology and Evolution: Insights From Ethologists and Behavioural Ecologists.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Fragmentation of Long Reads Enables Reliable Mitogenome Assembly From Whole-Genome Amplification Data With Pervasive Palindromic Reads.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- The impacts of biological invasions.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Distribution, scale, and drivers of mass mortality events in Europe's freshwater bivalves.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- Ecosystem services provided by spiders.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Taxonomic description curves of major lineages are influenced by biological and societal factors.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Protected area coverage of the full annual cycle of migratory butterflies.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Six-decade research bias towards fancy and familiar bird species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Fundamental questions in meiofauna research highlight how small but ubiquitous animals can improve our understanding of Nature.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Limited and biased global conservation funding means most threatened species remain unsupported.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A systematic scoping review reveals that geographic and taxonomic patterns influence the scientific and societal interest in urban soil microbial diversity.Environmental microbiome · 2025Review
- Article
- How is the concept of charisma used in the academic literature about biodiversity conservation? A systematic map protocol.Environmental evidence · 2024Article
- Low human interest for the most at-risk reef fishes worldwide.Science advances · 2024Article
- Macroecological correlates of Darwinian shortfalls across terrestrial vertebrates.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Optimal inventorying and monitoring of taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity.PloS one · 2024Article
- The diversity of ignorance and the ignorance of diversity: origins and implications of "shadow diversity" for conservation biology and extinction.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Review
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- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
18 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Knowledge of biodiversity is unevenly distributed across the Tree of Life. In the long run, such disparity in awareness unbalances our understanding of life on Earth, influencing policy decisions and the allocation of research and conservation funding. We investigated how humans accumulate knowledge of biodiversity by searching for consistent relationships between scientific (number of publications) and societal (number of views in Wikipedia) interest, and species-level morphological, ecological, and sociocultural factors. Across a random selection of 3019 species spanning 29 Phyla/Divisions, we show that sociocultural factors are the most important correlates of scientific and societal interest in biodiversity, including the fact that a species is useful or harmful to humans, has a common name, and is listed in the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. Furthermore, large-bodied, broadly distributed, and taxonomically unique species receive more scientific and societal attention, whereas colorfulness and phylogenetic proximity to humans correlate exclusively with societal attention. These results highlight a favoritism toward limited branches of the Tree of Life, and that scientific and societal priorities in biodiversity research broadly align. This suggests that we may be missing out on key species in our research and conservation agenda simply because they are not on our cultural radar.
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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.