TAXON-TIME · Rediscovering biodiversity: using big-data to trace taxonomic knowledge through time

Rediscovering biodiversity: using big-data to trace taxonomic knowledge through time

TAXON-TIME investigated how advances in taxonomy affect macroecological patterns of species richness and composition in tropical rainforests. Throughout centuries, taxonomists have been describing new species and revising, in light of new information, their taxonomic delimitation and classification. Advances in taxonomy often result in the lumping of several species into one, the splitting of a “single” species into several species, or re-assigning a species to a distinct genus. The resulting fluctuations in the identity and number of species have important implications for global biodiversity research and conservation. This is particularly true for tropical ecosystems. Due to the enormous biodiversity of tropical rainforests, changes in the taxonomy of tropical plants can introduce considerable uncertainty into global estimates of species richness and predictions of how tropical flora may respond to global warming or deforestation. Yet, fluctuations in the identity and number of species due to progress in taxonomy have remained so far functionally invisible for macroecology – the science that explains patterns of species richness, composition and abundance across broad spatial and evolutionary scales. TAXON-TIME project addressed this problem. The project revealed that taxonomic progress were crucial for shaping the current pattern of species richness and composition in the whole Neotropical region and in the Amazonian rainforest. More specifically, we observed that the well-documented geographic pattern of species richness and composition only emerge as a result of past taxonomic changes. TAXON-TIME also brought to light the debate about how patchy progress in taxonomy complicates global estimates of species richness. The results of the project challenged such estimates, reinforcing the idea that a single, universally accepted estimate of the number of species on Earth may never be achieved (Stropp et al. 2022). The project has stressed that quantifying uncertainty in estimates of species richness that emerge from taxonomy is a major scientific challenge – one that needs to be tackled by an interdisciplinary collaboration of taxonomists, macroecologists, and data scientists working across multiple taxa in different continents. TAXON-TIME highlighted that understanding macroecological patterns of tropical rainforests needs to go hand in hand with deepening our knowledge about species taxonomy.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз