Universidad de Navarra, Department of Environmental Biology, Pamplona, Spain.
PLoS One. 2019 Mar 8;14(3):e0213542. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213542. eCollection 2019.
The advent of online data aggregator infrastructures has facilitated the accumulation of Digital Accessible Knowledge (DAK) about biodiversity. Despite the vast amount of freely available data records, their usefulness for research depends on completeness of each body of data regarding their spatial, temporal and taxonomic coverage. In this paper, we assess the completeness of DAK about terrestrial mammals distributed across the Iberian Peninsula. We compiled a dataset with all records about mammals occurring in the Iberian Peninsula available in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and in the national atlases from Portugal and Spain. After cleaning the dataset of errors as well as records lacking collection dates or not determined to species level, we assigned all occurrences to a 10-km grid. We assessed inventory completeness by calculating the ratio between observed and expected richness (based on the Chao2 richness index) in each grid cell and classified cells as well-sampled or under-sampled. We evaluated survey coverage of well-sampled cells along four environmental gradients and temporal coverage. Out of 796,283 retrieved records, quality issues led us to remove 616,141 records unfit for this use. The main reason for discarding records was missing collection dates. Only 25.95% cells contained enough records to robustly estimate completeness. The DAK about terrestrial mammals from the Iberian Peninsula was low, and spatially and temporally biased. Out of 5,874 cells holding data, only 620 (9.95%) were classified as well-sampled. Moreover, well-sampled cells were geographically aggregated and reached inventory completeness over the same temporal range. Despite the increasing availability of DAK, its usefulness is still compromised by quality issues and gaps in data. Future work should therefore focus on increasing data quality, in addition to mobilizing unpublished data.
在线数据聚合基础设施的出现促进了数字可获取生物多样性知识（DAK）的积累。尽管有大量免费可用的数据记录，但它们对研究的有用性取决于每个数据集在空间、时间和分类覆盖方面的完整性。在本文中，我们评估了分布在伊比利亚半岛的陆地哺乳动物的 DAK 完整性。我们编制了一个数据集，其中包含全球生物多样性信息设施和葡萄牙和西班牙国家地图集中关于伊比利亚半岛出现的哺乳动物的所有记录。在清理数据集以消除错误以及缺乏采集日期或未确定到物种水平的记录后，我们将所有出现的情况分配到 10km 的网格中。我们通过计算每个网格单元中观察到的丰富度与预期丰富度（基于 Chao2 丰富度指数）的比值来评估库存的完整性，并将单元分类为充分采样或采样不足。我们评估了充分采样单元在四个环境梯度和时间覆盖方面的调查覆盖范围。在检索到的 796283 条记录中，质量问题导致我们删除了 616141 条不适合此用途的记录。丢弃记录的主要原因是缺少采集日期。只有 25.95%的单元包含足够的记录来可靠地估计完整性。伊比利亚半岛陆地哺乳动物的 DAK 数量较少，且在空间和时间上存在偏差。在包含数据的 5874 个单元中，只有 620 个（9.95%）被归类为充分采样。此外，充分采样的单元在地理上聚集在一起，并在相同的时间范围内达到了库存的完整性。尽管 DAK 的可用性不断增加，但数据质量问题和数据空白仍然影响了其有用性。因此，未来的工作应该除了调动未公开的数据外，还应侧重于提高数据质量。
