New Guinea is the most mountainous and biodiverse island in the world. Nearly 50% of its 16,000+ plant species are endemic and in some families endemism surpasses 70%. Accordingly, understanding how New Guinea’s often still poorly known plant diversity is distributed across the island, how it evolved, and how it will cope with land use change and predicted climate change is important for coordinated conservation actions. However, New Guinea remains under-collected and little is known about the geography of endemism and extinction risks. New Guinea is at risk of logging and oil palm development, especially in the flat lowland regions. Large-scale syntheses are thus essential for setting island-wide conservation priorities. Here, we assembled a large dataset of ca. 0.7 million herbarium specimens that were taxonomically-verified by a consortium of international experts and analyzed it using geospatial analyses to understand patterns of biological exploration and delineate priority areas for conservation.
Results/Conclusions
Based on 0.7 million herbarium specimens collected since the early 1800’s, we find that >2500 collectors have been active in New Guinea, but that just a handful of ‘big hitters’ (<1%) are responsible for 50% of all plant collections. After controlling for area, we find that the lest explored ecoregions with the fewest number of collections are the Southern New Guinea lowland rain forests and the Southern New Guinea freshwater swamp forests. By contrast, the best collected ecoregions are the Central range sub-alpine grasslands, Admiralty Islands lowland rain forests, and the Southeastern Papuan rain forests. Still, collecting activity is generally low for most areas and has markedly decreased in the last 30 years. Our understanding of western New Guinea is still incipient, as the Indonesian half of the island contains ten times fewer collections than Papua New Guinea. We propose three steps to remedy current knowledge gaps. First, recognizing that taxonomic institutions are instrumental to subsequent research in all fields of biological sciences, including ecology, it will be important to improve employment for the next-generation of taxonomists who will become tomorrow’s ‘big hitters’. Second, because resolving the taxonomy of big genera will make a disproportionate contribution to our understanding of New Guinea’s megadiversity, more international and multi-institutional partnerships are needed. Last, completing the digitization of existing collections housed in herbaria and building capacity in the region are essential.