Protecting global biodiversity in the face of rapid change requires comprehensive datasets on species distributions in order to establish baseline evidence from which change can be detected. Various international efforts to safeguard biodiversity critically depend on this information, which ultimately falls on individual nations to report. Thus, determining complementarity or redundancy of datasets, identifying biodiversity information gaps and understanding the factors that influence inventory coverage over time are priorities to both scientific and political communities.
Using over a century’s worth of digitally accessible species point occurrences, we investigated temporal trends in global coverage of terrestrial vertebrates at the national level. We determined each nation’s biodiversity inventory completeness using three metrics: (1) assemblage-level coverage, (2) species-level coverage, and (3) species-level coverage weighted by relative stewardship. We then identified temporal trends in biodiversity inventory completeness and determined the socioeconomic factors influencing national biodiversity knowledge.
Results/Conclusions
We find large heterogeneity between nations in biodiversity inventory completeness, even for spatially adjacent neighbors, suggesting a strong role of socioeconomic factors in determining a nation’s contribution to global biodiversity knowledge. While in general biodiversity inventories have tended to become increasingly complete, political upheaval or targeted census efforts are evident as temporary hiatuses or increases, respectively, in coverage metrics. Our findings will provide a critical assessment of the effectiveness of biodiversity inventories over the past century to understanding rapid changes in global biodiversity.