Yuanheng Li, Christian Devenish, Marie I Tosa, Mingjie Luo, David M Bell, Damon B Lesmeister, Paul Greenfield, Maximilian Pichler, Taal Levi, Douglas W Yu
Arthropods contribute importantly to ecosystem functioning but remain understudied. This undermines the validity of conservation decisions. Modern methods are now making arthropods easier to study, since arthropods can be mass-trapped, mass-identified, and semi-mass-quantified into 'many-row (observation), many-column (species)' datasets, with homogeneous error, high resolution, and copious environmental-covariate information. These 'novel community datasets' let us efficiently generate information on arthropod species distributions, conservation values, uncertainty, and the magnitude and direction of human impacts...
June 24, 2024: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences