More than 100 years of observations in nature have revealed a universal pattern of species abundances: Most species are rare but not very rare, and only a few species are very common. These so-called global species abundance distributions have become fully unveiled for some well-monitored species groups, such as birds. For other species groups, such as insects, however, the veil remains partially unlifted.
These are the findings of an international team of researchers led by the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research , the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Florida , published in the journalabundances on planet Earth and for understanding how they change.
Solving this problem calls for vast amounts of data. The study authors used data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and downloaded data representing over 1 billion species observations in nature from 1900 to 2019."The GBIF database is an amazing resource for all sorts of biodiversity related research, particularly because it brings together both data collected from professional and citizen scientists all over the world," says first author Dr. Corey Callaghan.
"If you don't have enough data, it looks as though most species are very rare," says senior author Prof Henrique Pereira, research group head at iDiv and the MLU. "Even though we have been recording observations for decades, we have only lifted the veil for a few species groups," says Callaghan."We still have a long way to go. But GBIF and the sharing of data really represents the future of biodiversity research and monitoring, to me."
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