Overcoming the Data Crisis in Biodiversity Conservation.

How can we track population trends when monitoring data are sparse? Population declines can go undetected, despite ongoing threats. For example, only one of every 200 harvested species are monitored. This gap leads to uncertainty about the seriousness of declines and hampers effective conservation. Collecting more data is important, but we can also make better use of existing information. Prior knowledge of physiology, life history, and community ecology can be used to inform population models. Additionally, in multispecies models, information can be shared among taxa based on phylogenetic, spatial, or temporal proximity. By exploiting generalities across species that share evolutionary or ecological characteristics within Bayesian hierarchical models, we can fill crucial gaps in the assessment of species' status with unparalleled quantitative rigor.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution

• Publication date

  2018-09-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Geography, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.tree.2018.06.004PMID 30007845
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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