Biases when researching on biodiversity in protected areas?

If, when researching on biodiversity in protected areas, there are biases towards certain groups of living beings, geographic regions and methodological approaches, knowledge of biodiversity may be incomplete.

An international team led by the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) in Spain has examined this issue and has found that scientific publications focused on the biodiversity of protected areas are biased towards certain groups of living beings, geographical regions and methodological approaches. This means that it is necessary to redirect research efforts to better conserve biodiversity.

Specifically, the authors of the study have found fewer academic publications that study plants than those that study animals (41% versus 59% of the total number of studies evaluated, respectively), with insects, mammals, and birds standing out within the latter group as the most frequently studied animals.

It was also detected that biodiversity has been measured almost exclusively based only on the number and identity of the species present in protected areas. In this way, both their representativeness in the evolutionary tree and their morphological, physiological and behavioral attributes (known as functional traits) have generally been ignored.

Number of academic articles that studied each group of species. (Image: Sonia Llorente Culebras)

In addition, geographic biases were discovered by finding few, and in some cases none, publications in countries in central Africa and Asia. The most studied protected areas are located in Europe and the United States, and are mainly terrestrial. Posts exploring marine protected areas were much less frequent.

The results of the research were obtained through an extensive systematic review of the scientific literature published since 1980 on the diversity of protected areas. From each selected publication, data was extracted on the species studied, the regions explored or the metrics used, among others.

The main strategy that most countries in the world are adopting to mitigate the mass extinction of species is the creation and establishment of protected areas. However, having as complete a knowledge of biodiversity as possible is essential to effectively design and assess protected areas that benefit the majority of species, rather than focusing resources on conserving a few.

“The results obtained in this work are important to know where the research effort should be directed to reduce these possible knowledge gaps and optimize the limited resources assigned to the conservation of species”, explains Sonia Llorente, first signatory of the study.

The study is titled “Publication trends in global biodiversity research on protected areas”. And it has been published in the academic journal Biological Conservation. (Source: UAM)