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Herbaria and Community Science: Complementary Tools for Informing Biodiversity
Nina Obiar; Isaac Eckert ; Janaina Serrano ; Simon Joly; Laura J. Pollock
Conservation planning and management requires reliable spatial models, but large knowledge gaps remain in our understanding of species geographical distributions. Here, we address the sampling effort needed to resolve data gaps for plants globally using both herbarium and community science (iNaturalist) records. We evaluate how well these data sources capture the vascular plant diversity of the world's botanic countries. We used these data sources to determine whether they fit different criteria representing the basic locational data needed to build a range outline and species distribution model used to estimate geographic distributions. We then estimate how species richness estimates vary and sample completeness with rarefaction curves. Overall, we find major deficiencies in the representation of global vascular plant diversity with approximately half of species having the minimal 3 points required to estimate the most basic spatial range and less than 12% with enough records to build basic species distribution models. Herbaria and community science contributed different but complementary roles with herbarium better representing richness with double the number of species recorded, on average, with community science having three times more records per species. Overall, both approaches demonstrate regional biases with more records being observed in the Global North. This work reveals where existing data sources fall short and ultimately, underscores the critical need of rapidly digitizing the world's remaining herbarium specimens and targeted community science initiatives to better estimate species diversity, distribution patterns, and biodiversity changes.
