Linking dimensions of data on global marine animal diversity

Abstract

Recent decades have seen an explosion in the amount of data available on all aspects of biodiversity, which has led to data-driven approaches to understand how and why diversity varies in time and space. Global repositories facilitate access to various classes of species-level data including biogeography, genetics and conservation status, which are in turn required to study different dimensions of diversity. Ensuring that these different data sources are interoperable is a challenge as we aim to create synthetic data products to monitor the state of the world's biodiversity. One way to approach this is to link data of different classes, and to inventory the availability of data across multiple sources. Here, we use a comprehensive list of more than 200 000 marine animal species, and quantify the availability of data on geographical occurrences, genetic sequences, conservation assessments and DNA barcodes across all phyla and broad functional groups. This reveals a very uneven picture: 44% of species are represented by no record other than their taxonomy, but some species are rich in data. Although these data-rich species are concentrated into a few taxonomic and functional groups, especially vertebrates, data are spread widely across marine animals, with members of all 32 phyla represented in at least one database. By highlighting gaps in current knowledge, our census of marine diversity data helps to prioritize future data collection activities, as well as emphasizing the importance of ongoing sustained observations and archiving of existing data into global repositories. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Integrative research perspectives on marine conservation’.

Integrative research perspectives on marine conservation

“…This is owing to the challenges of accessing many marine areas (deep sea, polar regions) and our lack of remote sensing tools to uncover marine biodiversity. In the first paper of this section, Webb & Vanhoorne [50] analyse the state of our knowledge on macroecological patterns in marine life. They find that for 44% of the more than 200 000 marine species in data repositories, only their taxonomic information is available, whereas other species are richer in data on biogeography, genetics, conservation status, etc.…”

Navigating uncertainty in maximum body size in marine metazoans

“…These habitats may exhibit greater habitat diversity compared to pelagic or demersal environments. Benthic species dominate marine biodiversity and occur in more animal phyla than other functional groups (Webb & Vanhoorne, 2020 ). The range of body forms and morphologies this encompasses likely exacerbates some of the methodological issues previously raised.…”

Climate change affects the distribution of diversity across marine food webs

“…We use a relatively simple set of feeding guilds where we take a higher split in the classification tree than those more complex guilds used by Thompson et al (2020), and these can be described as planktivores, benthivores and piscivores because of the mean relative % biomass contributions of those prey groups to their diets (Figure 1, Figure S1; Table S2). Prey were assigned to functional groups in R version 4.02 (R Core Team, 2020) after Webb and Vanhoorne (2020) using the ‘worrms’ package (Chamberlain, 2019). Planktivores are typically smaller‐bodied fish that feed on relatively small prey lower in the food web, whereas benthivores are intermediate in size, feed on intermediate sized prey and piscivores are the largest and feed on relatively large prey.…”