DOI: 10.5061/dryad.v15dv4270
title: Richness patterns in vertebrates are robust to the Linnean and Wallacean shortfalls

description: Nearly all research has to rely on imprecise data. This poses a challenge
 of knowing which conclusions are reliable despite potential data quality
 issues. One field fundamentally affected by this is macroecology. Can we
 understand drivers of biodiversity patterns without having fully reliable
 distributional data? In this paper, we investigated the reliability of
 biodiversity patterns focused on three groups of terrestrial vertebrates
 ranging from very well-known (birds and mammals) to relatively poorly
 known (amphibians). We compared two expert-derived sets of range maps
 generated more than 10 years apart. We found that the overall spatial
 diversity patterns between the two sets were extraordinarily similar for
 all three groups but that nearly half of all species had changes in
 taxonomy and or distribution. We further found that the minute changes in
 richness we did see were nearly exclusively driven by changes in the
 mapped ranges of already known species rather than the discovery of new
 species, even though up to 18% of new species were added between
 assessments. Since the patterns were highly similar between the asessments
 it suggests that, at least for vertebrates, data quality does not affect
 analyses of biodiversity patterns. This further implies that results based
 on older and less precise input data remains reliable, even though more
 precise input data has become available.
description: # Richness patterns in vertebrates are robust to the Linnean and Wallacean
 shortfalls.
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v15dv4270](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.v15dv4270) ## Description of the data and file structure All codes used to process the data in the paper have been uploaded as Software. Codes are found in a total of 21 files, names in order they are processed. Code_11 to Code_18 deals with initial data processing. Code_21 to Code_26 performs statistical tests, Code_31 to Code_37 creates all figures. We have also uploaded two files from the appendix in csv files. Table_A1 contains all species deleted between two time points Table_A1 contains all species added between two time points ### Files and variables #### File: Table\_A1.csv **Description**: contains all species deleted between two time points ##### Variables * Group: If the species is a mammal, a bird or an amphibian * Order: Taxonomic order * Family: Taxonomic family * Name_2023: The binomial name of the species the taxon is assigned to in the 2023 dataset * Name_2012: The binomial name of the species the taxon is assigned to in the 2012 dataset * Change: The type of change between the two datasets * Source: The taxonomic source we used to asses the type of change #### File: Table\_A2.csv **Description:**: contains all species added between two time points ##### Variables * Group: If the species is a mammal, a bird or an amphibian * Order: Taxonomic order * Family: Taxonomic family * Name_2023: The binomial name of the species the taxon is assigned to in the 2023 dataset * Name_2012: The binomial name of the species the taxon is assigned to in the 2012 dataset * Change: The type of change between the two datasets * Source: The taxonomic source we used to asses the type of change ## Code/software All analyses were conducted in R 4.1.2 (R Core Team 2021) and relied on functions from the libraries Dplyr (Wickham et al 2022), fasterize (Ross 2020), ggcorrplot (Kassambara 2023), ggplot2 (Wickham 2016), grid (R Core Team 2021), geosphere (Hijmans 2021), maptools (Bivand and Lewin-Koh 2022), ncf (Bjornstad 2022), pdist(Wong 2022), proj4 (Urbanek 2022), rphylopic (Gearty et al 2023), raster (Hijmans 2022a), rgeos (Bivand and Colin Rundel 2021), spdep (Bivand 2022), sf (Pebesma and Bivand 2023), patialreg (Bivand et al 2013), stars (Pebesma & Bivand 2023) and terra (Hijmans 2022b) ## Access information Other publicly accessible locations of the data: * n/a Data was derived from the following sources: * The analyses rely on primary data gathered by IUCN and birdlife.