Nine years ago, a team of environmentalists from Yale traced the life of the world, a project that showed bipatterns of diversity in a geographical context; basically a map of the warmth of animal life. Now, took it a step further: documenting the most likely places for unknown species to still exist, in the hope that those animals could be documented before disappearing.
The team’s research is published today in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. They took over 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 many lives remain uncatalogued on Earth, especially in Southeast Asia and Northwestern South America.
“Using models to identify the biological and environmental factors of recent discoveries, we are able to make fairly reliable predictions about what portion of future discoveries could take place in reasonable large groups of species (say, amphibian families) and regions (say, the Atlantic forest region of Brazil), ”co-author Walter Jetz, a biologist at Yale University, said in an e-mail. “As we run these models around the world and for large groups of terrestrial vertebrates, this provides an interesting basis for identifying gaps and opportunities for future discovery.”
Mapping the “discovery potential” of these animals encourages research teams to look specifically at areas where they are more likely to encounter animals recorded so far, the authors said. The mapping product can be seen Here.
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“We hope to shift our attention to questions such as’ How many undiscovered species are there?you there? to more applied ones such as “Where and what?” “, said Main author Mario Moura, a biologist at the University of Paraíba in Brazil, in an e-mail. “It is striking to see the importance of rainforests as a cradle of discovery, reinforcing the urgent need to protect rainforests and stop deforestation rates if we are to have a chance to truly discover our biodiversity. ”
Moura said previous estimates for species discoveries had 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 species size. (No wonder Madagascar nano-cameleon avoided documentation until this year).
Bornhowever, quantifying biodiversity in future-oriented geographical terms (knowing that it is worth more to investigate Madagascar than New Zealand, for example) serveas a heuristic for the search for undiscovered species, of which more and more are already emerging on the verge of critical extinction. This is the case of the Popa langur, a species of monkey from Myanmar – also a biodiversity hotspot after the team’s latest assessment.
It is unfortunate that human enterprise has tended to favor industrial gains which mean losses for wildlife. Even in the most remote areas of the planet, humanity finds a way to have a negative impact.
But that’s why this project exists, the authors said: to get an idea of what’s there, before any record remains.
“It’s a fascinating project that brings together a multitude of data sets on the distribution of species and allows us to better understand the patterns of biodiversity on the planet,” Moura said. “We hope to motivate citizen scientists and biodiversity enthusiasts about the importance of species discovery and ignite discussions and agreements with those responsible for decision-making and conservation planning.”
And, although 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 could be endangered.