Nine years ago, a team of Yale environmentalists traced the life of the world, a project that showed bipatterns of diversity in geographical context; basically a heat map of animal life. Nowthey have gone a step further: documenting the most likely points for unknown species to still exist, in the hope that these animals can be documented before they disappear.
The team’s research is 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 type of life that has probably not yet been discovered. Their findings suggest that a large amount of life remains uncatalogued on Earth, especially in Southeast Asia and northwestern South America.
“By using models to identify the biological and environmental drivers of recent discoveries, we can make fairly reliable predictions about what part of future discoveries might occur. reasonably large groups of species (e.g., amphibian families) and regions (e.g., the Atlantic forest region of Brazil), “co-author Walter Jetz, a biologist at Yale University, said in an email.” As we target these models around the world and major terrestrial vertebrate groups, this provides an intriguing basis for identifying gaps and opportunities for future discoveries. “
Maps of the “discovery potential” of these animals encourage research teams to specifically look for areas where they are more likely to encounter animals that have never been recorded, the authors said. You can see the mapping product here.
G / O Media may receive a commission
“We hope to change the focus of questions such as“ How many undiscovered species exist?is it there to more applied ones, such as ‘Where and what?’ “, he said main author Mario Moura, a biologist at the University of Paraíba in Brazil, in an email. “Is it is amazing to see the importance of tropical forests as the cradle of discovery, reinforcing the urgent need to protect tropical forests and stop deforestation rates if we are to truly discover our biodiversity. “
Moura said previous estimates of species discoveries only calculated the number of species per year since 1758, the year Carl Linnaeus initiated binomial nomenclatures. However, this approach does not take into account important factors such as habitat or species size. (It is not uncommon for that of Madagascar nanocameleó documentation evaded until this year).
He is bornhowever, it quantifies biodiversity in geographic terms focused on the future (knowing that it is better to investigate Madagascar than New Zealand, for example) to serves as a heuristic to search for undiscovered species, more and more of which come to light already in critical danger. Such is the case of the Popa lizard, a species of monkey in Myanmar, also a biodiversity hotspot according to the team’s most recent assessment.
It is unfortunate that human enterprise tends to favor industrial gains that mean losses to wildlife. Even in the most remote areas of the planet, humanity finds a way to make a negative impact.
But that is precisely why this project exists, the authors said: to get an idea of what is there before there is no record left.
“It’s a fascinating project, which brings together a multitude of data sets on species distribution and allows us to better understand the biodiversity patterns of the planet,” Moura said. “We hope to motivate citizen scientists and biodiversity enthusiasts about the importance of species discovery and ignite debates and agreements between those responsible for decision-making and conservation planning.”
And while the team’s estimates aren’t far from accurate, the idea is that these predictions will allow for specific approaches to be advanced for future field discoveries. In other words, they want to work smarter, not harder, to find unknown species that may be endangered.