Nine years ago, a team of Yale ecologists charted the life of the world, a project that showed bidiversity patterns in geographic context; actually a heat map of animal life. Now, they take it one step further: document the most likely places for unknown species to still exist, in the hope that those animals can be documented before they disappear.
The team’s investigation is on published today in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. They took more than 32,000 species from four different biological classes (amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds) to make calculations about the kind of life that is likely yet to be discovered. Their findings suggest that an abundance of life remains unclassified on Earth, especially from Southeast Asia and northwestern South America.
“By using models to identify the biological and environmental factors of recent discoveries, we can make fairly reliable predictions about what proportion of future discoveries could take place in reasonable large groups of species (say amphibian families) and regions (say the Atlantic Forest region of Brazil), ”said study co-author Walter Jetz, a biologist at Yale University, in an email. “Because we have conducted these models for the entire world and for the major terrestrial vertebrate groups, this provides an intriguing basis for identifying gaps and opportunities for future discoveries.”
By mapping the ‘discovery potential’ of these animals, research teams are encouraged to look specifically at areas where they will encounter previously unrecorded animals, the authors said. The card product is on display here
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“We hope to shift the focus from questions such as’ how many undiscovered species are there?there? ‘to more applied ones like’ Where and what? ‘ Said lead author Mario Moura, a biologist at the University of Paraíba in Brazil, in an email. “It is striking to see the importance of tropical forests as the cradle of discoveries, reinforcing the urgent need to protect tropical forests and halt the deforestation rates if we are to have a chance to truly discover our biodiversity. “
Moura said previous estimates for species discoveries have just calculated the number of species per year since 1758, the year Carl Linnaeus started binomial nomenclatures. However, this approach does not take into account important factors such as habitat or size of the species. (No wonder Madagascar’s nano chameleon evaded documentation until this year).
Bornnevertheless, quantifying biodiversity in forward-looking geographic terms (knowing, for example, that it is more worthwhile to research Madagascar than New Zealand) serves as a heuristic for searching for undiscovered species, of which more and more are emerging that are already critically endangered. Such is the case with the Popa langur, a monkey species in Myanmar – also a biodiversity hotspot according to the team’s most recent assessment.
It is unfortunate that human entrepreneurship tends to favor industrial gains that mean losses to wildlife. Even in the most remote corners of the planet, humanity is finding a way to have a negative impact.
But that’s exactly why this project exists, the authors said: to get a sense of what’s out there before there’s no record left.
“It is a fascinating project that brings together a large number of datasets on the distribution of species and allows us to better understand the biodiversity patterns on the planet,” Moura said. “We hope to motivate citizen scientists and biodiversity enthusiasts about the importance of species discovery and initiate discussions and agreements with those responsible for decision-making and conservation planning.”
And while the team’s estimates are by no means accurate, the idea is that such predictions will advance specific approaches to future field discoveries. In other words, they want to work smarter, not harder, to find unknown species that may be at risk.