Drivers of species knowledge across the tree of life.
Stefano Mammola, Martino Adamo, Dragan Antić, Jacopo Calevo, Tommaso Cancellario, Pedro Cardoso, Dan Chamberlain, Matteo Chialva, Furkan Durucan, Diego Fontaneto, Duarte Goncalves, Alejandro Martínez, Luca Santini, Iñigo Rubio-Lopez, Ronaldo Sousa, David Villegas-Rios, Aida Verdes, Ricardo A Correia
Author Information
Stefano Mammola: Molecular Ecology Group (MEG), Water Research Institute (CNR-IRSA), National Research Council, Verbania, Italy. ORCID
Martino Adamo: National Biodiversity Future Center, Palermo, Italy. ORCID
Dragan Antić: University of Belgrade - Faculty of Biology, Belgrade, Serbia.
Jacopo Calevo: Royal Botanic Gardens, London, United Kingdom. ORCID
Tommaso Cancellario: Molecular Ecology Group (MEG), Water Research Institute (CNR-IRSA), National Research Council, Verbania, Italy.
Pedro Cardoso: Laboratory for Integrative Biodiversity Research (LIBRe), Finnish Museum of Natural History (LUOMUS), University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Dan Chamberlain: Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology, University of Turin, Torino, Italy.
Matteo Chialva: National Biodiversity Future Center, Palermo, Italy. ORCID
Furkan Durucan: Department of Aquaculture, Isparta University of Applied Sciences, Isparta, Turkey. ORCID
Diego Fontaneto: Molecular Ecology Group (MEG), Water Research Institute (CNR-IRSA), National Research Council, Verbania, Italy. ORCID
Duarte Goncalves: CIIMAR, Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research, University of Porto, Matosinhos, Portugal. ORCID
Alejandro Martínez: Molecular Ecology Group (MEG), Water Research Institute (CNR-IRSA), National Research Council, Verbania, Italy.
Luca Santini: Department of Biology and Biotechnologies "Charles Darwin", Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
Iñigo Rubio-Lopez: Molecular Ecology Group (MEG), Water Research Institute (CNR-IRSA), National Research Council, Verbania, Italy. ORCID
Ronaldo Sousa: CBMA - Centre of Molecular and Environmental Biology, Department of Biology, University of Minho, Minho, Portugal. ORCID
David Villegas-Rios: Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas, CSIC, Eduardo Cabello, Vigo, Spain. ORCID
Aida Verdes: Department of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid, Spain. ORCID
Ricardo A Correia: Helsinki Lab of Interdisciplinary Conservation Science (HELICS), Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Knowledge of biodiversity is unevenly distributed across the Tree of Life. In the long run, such disparity in awareness unbalances our understanding of life on Earth, influencing policy decisions and the allocation of research and conservation funding. We investigated how humans accumulate knowledge of biodiversity by searching for consistent relationships between scientific (number of publications) and societal (number of views in Wikipedia) interest, and species-level morphological, ecological, and sociocultural factors. Across a random selection of 3019 species spanning 29 Phyla/Divisions, we show that sociocultural factors are the most important correlates of scientific and societal interest in biodiversity, including the fact that a species is useful or harmful to humans, has a common name, and is listed in the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. Furthermore, large-bodied, broadly distributed, and taxonomically unique species receive more scientific and societal attention, whereas colorfulness and phylogenetic proximity to humans correlate exclusively with societal attention. These results highlight a favoritism toward limited branches of the Tree of Life, and that scientific and societal priorities in biodiversity research broadly align. This suggests that we may be missing out on key species in our research and conservation agenda simply because they are not on our cultural radar.
