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Biodiversity data inform policies and decisions that will affect ecosystems and human wellbeing for centuries. To halt and reverse biodiversity loss, hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in conservation and restoration, including biodiversity offset and credit schemes. Biodiversity data are the non-negotiable basis of any such initiatives; however, monitoring efforts to assess biodiversity baselines and change are distributed unequally over space. For example, biodiversity is greatest in the tropics, but biodiversity data richness is greater towards the poles. Yet, solely accounting for latitude will not be a panacea. The systems that underpin patchy biodiversity records are highly complex and driven by various human processes; the social infrastructures that underlie such data disparities and their consequences for data-derived decisions must be considered.
A 2024 article by Chapman and colleagues examined how global-scale disparities in biodiversity data richness follow macroeconomic patterns and demonstrated that these disparities not only distort understanding of biodiversity but also impede effective and equitable solutions to combat biodiversity loss. The authors mapped billions of species observations and uncovered that data richness hotspots are extremely skewed towards high-income nations and that these disparities have become increasingly pronounced through time. Chapman et al. also show that data disparities at smaller spatial scales reflect legacies of social and political inequities. Human histories — such as armed conflicts or racist policies — have clearly shaped biodiversity records in time and space. In the USA, for example, neighbourhoods affected by race-based zoning policies during the 1930s (‘redlining’) are today the most undersampled areas for bird biodiversity, which potentially biases conservation priorities and fuels environmental inequities.
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