Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species’ threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project – and avert – future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups – including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems – http://www.predicts.org.uk). We make site-level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015.

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used this evidence base to develop global and regional statistical models of how local biodiversity responds to these measures. We describe and make freely available this 2016 release of the database, containing more than 3.2 million records sampled at over 26,000 locations and representing over 47,000 species. We outline how the database can help in answering a range of questions in ecology and conservation biology. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most geographically and taxonomically representative database of spatial comparisons of biodiversity that has been collated to date; it will be useful to researchers and international efforts wishing to model and understand the global status of biodiversity.

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Abstract1. Pollination studies tend to focus on the conventional agriculture associated with Europe and the USA, leaving a gap in our understanding of how pollination services are maintained in smallholder agricultural systems that dominate much of the developing world.2. In South Sinai, Egypt, almond is cultivated as part of an arid agroforestry system in traditional orchard gardens that contain a mixture of fruit trees inter-planted with vegetables and herbs. This study investigated the relative contribution of honeybees and wild insects for pollination of almond trees and assessed how flowering ground vegetation influenced pollinator densities and fruit set.3. Results showed that almond was highly dependent on insect pollination, with bagged flowers producing less than 8% of the fruit set of insect and hand pollinated flowers. Fruit set was correlated with wild pollinator visitation, but not with honeybee visitation. Furthermore, the presence of honeybee hives had no effect upon fruit set.5. The abundance and species richness of flowering ground vegetation was positively related to pollinator abundance within the gardens and associated with enhanced fruit set. Over half of the flowering ground flora were minority crops grown alongside almond, suggesting that facilitation can occur between simultaneously flowering crops.6. In these diverse orchard gardens, flowering minority crops benefited wild pollinators and increased fruit set in the primary orchard crop. If mutual facilitation occurs between other crop species, then the diverse cropping systems associated with smallholder farms are likely to enhance pollination services within traditional agricultural landscapes.

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