Will Africa meet the challenge of biodiversity conservation in the digital age?

Abstract

Digital accessible knowledge (DAK) is of utmost importance for biodiversity conservation; indeed, its use is indispensable to provide evidence and strategies to support decision-making on natural resource management and sustainable use. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, www.gbif.org) is a mega data infrastructure with more than two billion occurrence records as of 28 May 2022. It is by far the largest initiative assembling and sharing DAK to support scientific research, conservation, and sustainable development. We decided to analyze plant data published at the GBIF site at the scale of Africa. This will highlight the contribution of the continent to the GBIF and thereby underline data gaps across taxonomic groups, the basis of records, and geographic space. To achieve our purpose, we downloaded data from the Plantae kingdom from Africa. They are available at https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.f79228. We achieved data treatment and analysis using R, several packages and related functions. Although Africa is home to rich biodiversity with many hotspots, the global data contribution of Africa to the GBIF is still incredibly low (1.37%). Furthermore, there are huge disparities between African countries, with South Africa contributing alone for 65% of the data of the continent. The plant data of Africa (2,713,790 occurrence records) accounted for 9.11% of the data of the continent; this underlines huge gaps between taxonomic groups. Furthermore, Magnoliopsida was the dominant plant class with the highest number of records (79.62%) and the highest number of species (71.85%), followed by Liliopsida, with 15.10% of the records and 18.16% of the species. Two sources of records were dominant: preserved specimens (75.49%) and human observation (18.60%). In geographic space, plant data gaps are also quite large across the continent at either spatial resolution (half degree or one degree spatial grid cells); data completeness is more achieved in West Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, and Madagascar. The large multidimensional data gaps identified in this study should be a priority addressed in future data collections. Accessibility either by roads or waterways and protected areas are underpinning factors of data completeness across the continent. We deplored important data loss during the process of data cleaning; indeed, the total number of records with adequate coordinates accounted for 71.03% of the initial data, while the data fitness for use in completeness analysis (records with adequate coordinates and full dates) was only approximately 65% of the total data records initially downloaded.