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Predicting unknown species numbers using discovery curves
Open accessAbstract
A common approach to estimating the total number of extant species in a taxonomic group is to extrapolate from the temporal pattern of known species descriptions. A formal statistical approach to this problem is provided. The approach is applied to a number of global datasets for birds, ants, mosses, lycophytes, monilophytes (ferns and horsetails), gymnosperms and also to New World grasses and UK flowering plants. Overall, our results suggest that unless the inventory of a group is nearly complete, estimating the total number of species is associated with very large margins of error. The strong influence of unpredictable variations in the discovery process on species accumulation curves makes these data unreliable in estimating total species numbers.
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Cited by
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Mora, C., Tittensor, D. P., Adl, S., Simpson, A. G. B., & Worm, B. (2011) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127 · Cited by 3,045
“birds [21], fishes [22]), we are still remarkably uncertain as to how many species there are for most taxonomic groups, highlighting a significant gap in our basic knowledge of life on Earth.”
BackgroundInfluentialHow Many Species of Insects and Other Terrestrial Arthropods Are There on Earth?
Stork, N. E. (2018) · Annual Review of Entomology · doi:10.1146/annurev-ento-020117-043348 · Cited by 1,537
What we know and don’t know about Earth's missing biodiversity
Scheffers, B. R., Joppa, L. N., Pimm, S. L., & Laurance, W. F. (2012) · Trends in Ecology & Evolution · doi:10.1016/j.tree.2012.05.008 · Cited by 437
Shortfalls and opportunities in terrestrial vertebrate species discovery
Moura, M. R., & Jetz, W. (2021) · Nature Ecology & Evolution · doi:10.1038/s41559-021-01411-5 · Cited by 196
How taxonomic change influences forecasts of the Linnean shortfall (and what we can do about it)?
Lessa, T., Stropp, J., Hortal, J., & Ladle, R. J. (2024) · Journal of Biogeography · doi:10.1111/jbi.14829 · Cited by 29
Metadata
- Authors
- Bebber, D. P., Marriott, F. H. C., Gaston, K. J., Harris, S. A., & Scotland, R. W.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2007-04-24
- Volume
- 274
- Issue
- 1618
- Pages
- 1651-1658
- ISSN
- 0080-4649 (ISSN-L)
- 0962-8452
- 1471-2954
- OpenAlex
- W2151173963
- Cited by
- 158
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 4.84
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- Bebber, D. P., Marriott, F. H. C., Gaston, K. J., Harris, S. A., & Scotland, R. W. (2007). Predicting unknown species numbers using discovery curves. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2007.0464
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
