The ongoing loss of biodiversity and a critical lack of biodiversity data have motivated international efforts to compile and complement our knowledge on biodiversity. Biodiversity information across all levels of ecological organization is crucial for understanding eco-evolutionary processes and responses of Earth system functions to anthropogenic disturbance.
To investigate whether biodiversity research is (i) balanced across countries regarding study sites, institutions and core scientists, (ii) conducted in biodiversity hot spots, and (iii) balanced to the level of ecological organization, research domain and taxonomic group, we analyzed biodiversity-related publications extracted from the Web of Science for the timespan 1945-2014. We identified study sites of publications on a country level and crossed this information with the country of the authors’ affiliation and its gross domestic product. We assumed research effort spent on biodiversity in a country to be expressed by the number of publications and compared this measure to the number of threatened species, the number of ecoregions and the fraction of protected area in each country. Furthermore, we identified core scientists in biodiversity research and analyzed their affiliations. We allocated all publications to their topical focus with regard to ecological level, research domain and taxonomic group, and identified temporal research trends.
Results/Conclusions
We demonstrate that biodiversity research is mainly conducted and dominated by wealthy countries. Only a few countries dominate the research agenda, and core scientists in biodiversity research are mainly affiliated with universities in North America and Europe. We observed a research deficit in regions with high proportions of ecoregions and threatened species. Hence, only a weak correlation exists between hot spots of biodiversity and hot spots of biodiversity research. Furthermore, based on research domain, ecological level, and taxonomic groups, we show that the majority of biodiversity research was and is conducted on terrestrial systems, on a species level, and on plants.
In order to complement our knowledge on biodiversity, investments into research capacity are critically needed in regions with a high proportion of threatened species and high numbers of ecoregions, which currently exhibit research deficits in order to achieve political goals such as the Aichi biodiversity targets. A shift from research on well-known systems and taxonomic groups in heavily studied regions to the risky and unknown is essential to increase our knowledge on biodiversity.