GeoZentrum Nordbayern, Department of Geography and Geosciences, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany.
School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK.
Nat Ecol Evol. 2022 Feb;6(2):145-154. doi: 10.1038/s41559-021-01608-8. Epub 2021 Dec 30.
Sampling biases in the fossil record distort estimates of past biodiversity. However, these biases not only reflect the geological and spatial aspects of the fossil record, but also the historical and current collation of fossil data. We demonstrate how the legacy of colonialism and socioeconomic factors, such as wealth, education and political stability, impact the global distribution of fossil data over the past 30 years. We find that a global power imbalance persists in palaeontology, with researchers in high- or upper-middle-income countries holding a monopoly over palaeontological knowledge production by contributing to 97% of fossil data. As a result, some countries or regions tend to be better sampled than others, ultimately leading to heterogeneous spatial sampling across the globe. This illustrates how efforts to mitigate sampling biases to obtain a truly representative view of past biodiversity are not disconnected from the aim of diversifying and decolonizing our discipline.
化石记录中的采样偏差会扭曲对过去生物多样性的估计。然而，这些偏差不仅反映了化石记录的地质和空间方面，还反映了化石数据的历史和当前编纂情况。我们展示了殖民主义的遗留问题以及财富、教育和政治稳定等社会经济因素如何影响过去 30 年全球化石数据的分布。我们发现，古生物学领域仍然存在全球权力失衡的现象，高收入或中上收入国家的研究人员通过贡献化石数据的 97%，垄断了古生物学知识的生产。因此，一些国家或地区的样本往往比其他地区更好，最终导致全球范围内的空间采样存在异质性。这说明了为获得过去生物多样性的真实代表性视图而努力减轻采样偏差的工作与使我们的学科多样化和非殖民化的目标并非不相关。
