Roderic Page has suggested that GBIF could make es50 maps similar to what organizations like OBIS are already doing. I decided to make one for land animals (graph above).
@jwaller This is SO COOL! Thanks for doing this (I know @mcostello has been pushing for this for a while as well). I think it would be helpful for GBIF to have more “derived products” like this on its home page, Put another way, currently the emphasis is more on “information” and less on “knowledge”. Also like the use of dggrid - I think grids are going to be the way we start to synthesise biodiversity information with data from other sources, it also leads more readily to Semantic Web approaches (I have some notes at RDF and discrete global grid systems ).
Thanks @rdmpage, your comments have very much been the inspiration for the post. I agree that dggrid is very cool. I had not used before this post, but it is very satisfying to use those equal area hexagons. While es50 is not perfect, it definitely beats species counts on several fronts (especially visually!). In the fail cases (like insects), I guess there might be some quality control that could be put in place… I am thinking something like dataset slopes with the effort per taxon unit. Then datasets like the mailaise trap projects would have really low slopes, and satelite tracked birds would have really high slopes… any ideas?
Interesting, I guess this depends on datasets being discrete sampling events, such as “bioblitzes”, tracking programmes, etc. But I guess you’re suggesting that there may be a signature that you can use to determine whether a dataset might be, say, a single extensive sampling event versus an aggregation over time of many different samples (e.g., a museum collection). Or, maybe if we wait long enough we’ll see enough sampling events like 1D MinION sequencing for large-scale species discovery: 7000 scuttle flies (Diptera: Phoridae) from one site in Kibale National Park (Uganda) revealed to belong to >650 species to balance out the Swedish Malaise traps?
Great stuff John. This is my dream come true - across taxon indicators of where species richness is more and less for terrestrial species. If you included the marine cells I expect they’d be on the lower side. I wonder if there is a coastal effect in combining marine + terrestrial species in those hexagons.
The latitudinal gradients are fascinating too. We have also found them bimodaloverall marine taxa and in most groups and wondered whether it may also be the case in land and freshwaters (one terrestrial paper suggested they were).
I hope you will continue with a publish this - exciting work to show the global picture like this for the first time.