Geography
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species' threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project - and avert - future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups - including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems - www.predicts.org.uk). We make site-level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015. The collation of biodiversity datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents is necessary to understand historical declines and to project - and hopefully avert - future declines. We describe a newly collated database of more than 1.6 million biodiversity measurements from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world.
Corrigendum: In the recent article by Hudson et al. (2014), the authors would like to update the URL for the PREDICTS project in the Abstract, Introduction and Discussion sections to read as follow:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/our-work/biodiversity/predicts.html
The article has been corrected online.
Publication Title
Ecology and Evolution
Publication Date
12-1-2014
Volume
4
Issue
24
First Page
4701
Last Page
4735
ISSN
2045-7758
DOI
10.1002/ece3.1303
Keywords
data sharing, global change, habitat destruction, land use
Repository Citation
Hudson, Lawrence N.; Newbold, Tim; Contu, Sara; Hill, Samantha L.L.; Lysenko, Igor; De Palma, Adriana; Phillips, Helen R.P.; Senior, Rebecca A.; Bennett, Dominic J.; Booth, Hollie; Choimes, Argyrios; Correia, David L.P.; Day, Julie; Echeverría-Londoño, Susy; Garon, Morgan; Harrison, Michelle L.K.; Ingram, Daniel J.; Jung, Martin; Kemp, Victoria; Kirkpatrick, Lucinda; Martin, Callum D.; Pan, Yuan; White, Hannah J.; Aben, Job; Abrahamczyk, Stefan; Adum, Gilbert B.; Aguilar-Barquero, Virginia; Aizen, Marcelo A.; Ancrenaz, Marc; Arbeláez-Cortés, Enrique; Armbrecht, Inge; Azhar, Badrul; and Williams, Christopher A., "The PREDICTS database: A global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts" (2014). Geography. 891.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/891
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright
Must link to published article with DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.1303