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.