Taxonomic bias in biodiversity data and societal preferences.

ABSTRACT: Studying and protecting each and every living species on Earth is a major challenge of the 21^st century. Yet, most species remain unknown or unstudied, while others attract most of the public, scientific and government attention. Although known to be detrimental, this taxonomic bias continues to be pervasive in the scientific literature, but is still poorly studied and understood. Here, we used 626 million occurrences from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the biggest biodiversity data portal, to characterize the taxonomic bias in biodiversity data. We also investigated how societal preferences and taxonomic research relate to biodiversity data gathering. For each species belonging to 24 taxonomic classes, we used the number of publications from Web of Science

SUBMITTER: Troudet J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5567328 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature