The important challenge of quantifying tropical diversity

Abstract

The tropics are the repository of much of the world's biodiversity, yet are undersampled relative to temperate regions. To help fill this knowledge gap, a paper in BMC Biology explores diversity patterns in tropical African plants, as revealed by the RAINBIO database. The paper documents spatial variation in diversity and data coverage, but also highlights the challenges faced in quantifying diversity patterns using data collated from a range of sources including herbaria.See research article: http://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-017-0356-8 .

Fig. 1.

Rigorous ecological survey data are strongly concentrated in temperate latitudes. For example, this plot illustrates the density of survey points, in relation to latitude (degrees north and south, with the equator indicated by the dashed line), in the BioTIME database of assemblage time series [1]. The dearth of these data from tropical regions demonstrates the importance of databases [5] and analyses, as in [4], which draw on different data sources