Looking forwards
As a scientific community, we should have moved past manually drawing
maps of where we assume species are, yet such maps still form the basis
of almost all global and regional assessments on biodiversity. Here, we
demonstrate that inherent and inconsistent biases within and between
these datasets arise from the use of administrative or other convenient
boundaries to demarcate species limits, missing up to half the records
of many species. Such approaches will lead to incorrect assessments of
species vulnerability, potentially highlighting the wrong areas for
conservation or management for both single species and communities,
especially where transitioning from tropical to subtropical or temperate
areas.
Whilst these ERMs were adequate when data were unavailable, initiatives
for data digitization and sharing are finally gaining traction as more
high-resolution satellite data. Methodological approaches that enable
the modelling of species ranges based on data-driven approaches like
those shown here are the obvious choice ahead. Whilst expert knowledge
has a crucial role in developing and testing such analyses and
developing standard frameworks to ensure outputs are meaningful, we have
reached a point where we can begin developing truly automated,
standardized approaches to inform conservation. We can no longer rely on
inconsistent or biased datasets, as doing so limits efforts to digitize
real point data and develop new approaches, and conservation advice
should no longer rely entirely on these types of expert data alone.