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Estimates of the number of undescribed species should account for sampling effort

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 8, pages 637–640 (2024)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 21 February 2024

The Original Article was published on 22 March 2021

arising from M. R. Moura & W. Jetz Nature Ecology & Evolution https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01411-5 (2021)

Moura and Jetz1 examined the shortfalls and opportunities in terrestrial vertebrate species discovery, notably integrating biological, environmental, sociological and temporal variables. Their study is a novel and stark illustration of the potential for biodiversity to be lost before its discovery2,3, as 5 million to 11 million species are likely to exist4,5 whereas only 2.16 million have been described as of 2022 (www.ourworldindata.org). Moura and Jetz have laid the foundation to develop improved methods to account for sampling bias and the influence of spatio-environmental variables; however, their analyses make the assumption that recently described species should be consistently positively correlated with the number of remaining undescribed species within a given region. As we show below, this assumption has limitations that could affect the interpretation of the study.

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Fig. 1: Hypothetical example of how time-to-event models could lead to incorrect predictions about undescribed biodiversity.
Fig. 2: Global patterns of amphibian sampling efforts and discovery potential.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Foreign Youth Talent Program (QN2021014013L) from the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China to A.B.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, School of Biological Sciences, Washington State University, Vancouver, WA, USA

    Sky Button

  2. Laboratory of Animal Behaviour and Conservation, College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China

    Amaël Borzée

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  1. Sky Button
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S.B. identified the need for a correction. S.B. and A.B. significantly contributed to the first draft and subsequent revisions.

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Correspondence to Sky Button or Amaël Borzée.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Joaquin Hortal for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Button, S., Borzée, A. Estimates of the number of undescribed species should account for sampling effort. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 637–640 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02312-5

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