A new multi-metric approach for quantifying global biodiscovery and conservation priorities reveals overlooked hotspots for amphibians

TL;DR

This study introduces a comprehensive multi-metric method to identify global amphibian biodiversity hotspots with high potential for discovering undocumented species and informing conservation priorities, addressing gaps in current biodiversity data.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrative approach combining environmental, sampling, and conservation data to better identify regions with undocumented amphibian species and conservation needs.

Findings

Identified key regions like Southeast Asia and tropical Africa as biodiversity hotspots.

Ranked ecoregions by biodiscovery potential, highlighting areas with high undocumented species richness.

High-scoring pixels are widely distributed across multiple ecoregions.

Abstract

Undocumented species represent one of the largest hurdles for conservation efforts due to the uncertainty they introduce into conservation planning. Until the distribution of earth's biodiversity is better understood, substantial conjecture will continue to be required for protecting species from anthropogenic extinction. Therefore, we developed a novel approach for identifying regions with promising biodiscovery prospects, linked to integrative conservation priorities, which we illustrate using amphibians. Our approach builds on previous estimates of biodiscovery priorities by simultaneously (1) considering linkages between spatio-environmental variables and biodiversity, (2) accounting for the negative relationship between past sampling intensity and future biodiscovery potential, (3) incorporating a priori knowledge about global species distribution patterns, (4) addressing spatial autocorrelation in community composition, and (5) weighting theoretical undocumented species by their predicted levels of conservation need. Using boosted regression trees and 50km^2 map pixels spread across the global range of amphibians, we identified several regions likely to contain many undocumented amphibian species and conservation needs, including the Southeast Asian Archipelago, humid portions of sub-Saharan Africa, and undersampled portions of the Amazon, Andes Mountains, and Central America. We also ranked top-scoring ecoregions by their mean and maximum biodiscovery potential and found that the top-20 ranked ecoregions were most concentrated in the Southeast Asian Archipelago and tropical Africa for undocumented species richness, and in tropical Africa and tropical South America for integrative undocumented amphibian conservation needs. However, high-scoring pixels tended to be widely distributed across different ecoregions for both biodiscovery scoring approaches.