The impact of taxonomic bias when comparing past and present species diversity

Carrasco, Marc A.

doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2012.06.010

Cited by 15 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Our equal-spread subsampled diversity estimates demonstrate that correcting for spatial biases can yield flatter diversity trajectories relative to uncorrected data. However, we anticipate that studies of diversity in deep time will increasingly focus on quantifying species-area relationships 32 36 37 38 39 67 —which encode information about patterns of alpha, beta and gamma diversity—and how they vary through time and space. This approach will provide rich new insights about the history of biodiversity on our planet.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Relationships between the apparent richness of fossil taxa and the palaeogeographic spread over which fossils have been collected could result from either of two non-mutually-exclusive models: (1) ‘record bias', in which species richness covaries with sampled area purely due to the confounding effect of uneven spatial sampling and species-area relationships; or (2) ‘common cause', in which Earth system processes (for example, sea-level change, tectonic activity) ultimately determine both the sizes of individual regions available for sampling and their corresponding species richness. Previous attempts to correct for variation in palaeogeographic spread 8 32 33 34 36 37 38 39 would not allow the roles of these two alternative models to be distinguished, making it difficult to determine whether the corrections were appropriate (under a record bias model) or not (under a common cause model). Nevertheless, the issue can be circumvented by drawing fossil occurrences from geographic regions of equal size through time and space before the application of richness-estimation methods.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Controlling for the species-area effect supports constrained long-term Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate diversification

et al. 2017

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Variation in the geographic spread of fossil localities strongly biases inferences about the evolution of biodiversity, due to the ubiquitous scaling of species richness with area. This obscures answers to key questions, such as how tetrapods attained their tremendous extant diversity. Here, we address this problem by applying sampling standardization methods to spatial regions of equal size, within a global Mesozoic-early Palaeogene data set of non-flying terrestrial tetrapods. We recover no significant increase in species richness between the Late Triassic and the Cretaceous/Palaeogene (K/Pg) boundary, strongly supporting bounded diversification in Mesozoic tetrapods. An abrupt tripling of richness in the earliest Palaeogene suggests that this diversity equilibrium was reset following the K/Pg extinction. Spatial heterogeneity in sampling is among the most important biases of fossil data, but has often been overlooked. Our results indicate that controlling for variance in geographic spread in the fossil record significantly impacts inferred patterns of diversity through time.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Controlling for the species-area effect supports constrained long-term Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate diversification

et al. 2017

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“…There is a large body of case studies demonstrating the dependence of macroecological inferences on quality of taxonomic resolution (Sheppard 1998;Genner et al 2004;Dillon and Fjeldså 2005;Mitchell and Meisterfeld 2005;Heger et al 2009;Evangelista et al 2014;Löbl and Leschen 2014). The so called taxonomic bias (Clark and May 2002;Nilsson-Ö rtmann and Nilsson 2010;Carrasco 2013) is thought to be among the most significant sources of errors and misinterpretations in macroecological studies able to distort their conclusions. Another factor that may potentially generate biased inferences is taxonomic uncertainty caused by, for example, different views of systematists on the nature of the biological species and criteria of taxa delineation (Hey et al 2003;Isaac et al 2004;Heger et al 2009).…”

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confidence: 99%

How does the discrepancies among taxonomists affect macroecological patterns? A case study of freshwater snails of Western Siberia

Vinarski

Крамаренко

2015

Biodivers Conserv

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From the point of view of biogeographers and ecologists, taxonomy is not only a means of ordering life but also a source of some problems able to impede the progress in studies of large-scale patterns of biological diversity. Discrepancies among systematists caused, inter alia, by their different views on the species concept and criteria for species delineation, are commonly thought to provoke errors and misinterpretations in macroecological inferences. In this study, we discuss a case of freshwater gastropods of Western Siberia. Two systematic frameworks, developed in Western Europe and Russia and drastically different in number of accepted genera and species, were proposed to classify the Palearctic aquatic snails. Having compared two sets of diversity data generated on the basis of the two systematic frameworks, we found that their parameters do not differ significantly. Such patterns as latitudinal gradients in total species richness, portion of branchiate snail species, and portion of species of non-European origin proved to remain the same, irrespective of which taxonomic approach, Western European, or Russian, is accepted. The absence of reliable changes in macroecological patterns may be explained by nearly consistent ''splitting effort'' applied by the Russian taxonomists in their revision of different families of aquatic snails. Thus, though the European and the Russian Communicated by David Hawksworth.Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

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“…Different bones have varying diagnostic value throughout a skeleton, and which of those bones are most diagnostic depends on the taxonomic group in question (Polly & Head 2004; Soligo & Andrews 2005; Bell et al . 2010; Mannion & Upchurch 2010a; Zeder & Pilaar 2010; Hendy 2011; Carrasco 2013). As Mannion & Upchurch (2010a) warned, completeness as defined by SCM and CCM does not necessarily equate to quality, or diagnosability, of specific material.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ten more years of discovery: revisiting the quality of the sauropodomorph dinosaur fossil record

et al. 2020

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Spatiotemporal changes in fossil specimen completeness can bias our understanding of a group's evolutionary history. The quality of the sauropodomorph fossil record was assessed a decade ago, but the number of valid species has since increased by 60%, and 17% of the taxa from that study have since undergone taxonomic revision. Here, we assess how 10 years of additional research has changed our outlook on the group's fossil record. We quantified the completeness of all 307 sauropodomorph species currently considered valid using the skeletal completeness metric, which calculates the proportion of a complete skeleton preserved for each taxon. Taxonomic and stratigraphic age revisions, rather than new species, are the drivers of the most significant differences between the current results and those of the previous assessment. No statistical differences appeared when we use our new dataset to generate temporal completeness

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The impact of taxonomic bias when comparing past and present species diversity

Cited by 15 publications

References 49 publications

Controlling for the species-area effect supports constrained long-term Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate diversification

Controlling for the species-area effect supports constrained long-term Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate diversification

How does the discrepancies among taxonomists affect macroecological patterns? A case study of freshwater snails of Western Siberia

Ten more years of discovery: revisiting the quality of the sauropodomorph dinosaur fossil record

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