Globally distributed occurrences utilised in 200 spider species conservation profiles (Arachnida, Araneae)

Abstract

Data on 200 species of spiders were collected to assess the global threat status of the group worldwide. To supplement existing digital occurrence records from GBIF, a dataset of new occurrence records was compiled for all species using published literature or online sources, from which geographic coordinates were extracted or interpreted from locality description data. A total of 5,104 occurrence records were obtained, of which 2,378 were from literature or online sources other than GBIF. Of these, 2,308 had coordinate data. Reporting years ranged from 1834 to 2017. Most records were from North America and Europe, with Brazil, China, India and Australia also well represented.

Current GBIF occurrence data demonstrates both promise and limitations for potential red listing of spiders

“…Occurrence data for these 200 species were collected from the taxonomic bibliography available at the same database until the end of 2017. Data from publications found on Google Scholar and several other online sources were also included in this dataset and detailed in Cardoso et al (2019). The use of literature as the baseline for these assessments follows established IUCN procedures for Red List methodologies (IUCN 2012).…”

“…R scripts used for data retrieval and processing are available on GitHub (https://github.com/vmshirey/spiders) where the dated version of this repository that corresponds to this publication is December 2019. The literature datasets were contributed to GBIF and consisted of 2,378 records for the global list and 30,141 records for all the Iberian taxa (Cezón and Cardoso 2019, Cardoso et al 2019).…”