biodiversity topics for research paper

133 Biodiversity Topics & Examples

🔝 top-10 biodiversity topics for presentation, 🏆 best biodiversity project topics, 💡 most interesting biodiversity assignment topics, 📌 simple & easy biodiversity related topics, 👍 good biodiversity title ideas, ❓ biodiversity research topics.

• Biodiversity loss.
• Global biodiversity conservation.
• The Amazon rainforest.
• Animal ecology research.
• Sub Saharan Africa.
• Marine biodiversity.
• Threats to ecosystems.
• Plant ecology.
• Importance of environmental conservation.
• Evolution of animal species.
• Biodiversity Hotspots: The Philippines The International Conservation has classified the Philippines as one of the biodiversity hotspots in the world. Additionally, the country is said to be one of the areas that are endangered in the world.
• Biodiversity Benefits for Ecology This variation of species in the ecosystem is a very important concept and factor that indeed is the basis for sustaining life on our planet. Moreover, the most important supporter of life, which is soil […]
• Aspects, Importance and Issues of Biodiversity Genetic diversity is a term used to refer to the dissimilitude of organisms of the same species. Species diversity is used to refer to dissimilitude of organisms in a given region.
• Loss of Biodiversity and Extinctions It is estimated that the number of species that have become extinct is greater than the number of species that are currently found on earth.
• Climate Change’s Negative Impact on Biodiversity This essay’s primary objective is to trace and evaluate the impact of climate change on biological diversity through the lens of transformations in the marine and forest ecosystems and evaluation of the agricultural sector both […]
• Habitat Destruction and Biodiversity Extinctions The instance of extinction is by and large regarded as the demise of the very last character of the genus. Habitat obliteration has played a major part in wiping out of species, and it is […]
• Biodiversity Conservation: Tropical Rainforest The forest is not a threat to many species and that, therefore, helps in showing that conserving this forest will be of great benefit to many species. The disadvantage of conserving the Mangrove Forest is […]
• When Human Diet Costs Too Much: Biodiversity as the Ultimate Answer to the Global Problems Because of the unreasonable use of the natural resources, environmental pollution and inadequate protection, people have led a number of species to extinction; moreover, due to the increasing rates of consumerist approach towards the food […]
• Biology Lab Report: Biodiversity Study of Lichens As a consequence of these results, the variety of foods found in forest flora that include lichens may be linked to varying optimum conditions for establishment and development.
• The Importance of Biodiversity in Ecosystem The most urgent problem right now is to maintain the level of biodiversity in this world but it has to begin with a more in-depth understanding of how different species of flora and fauna can […]
• How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity The disturbance of the ecosystem has some effects on the dynamics of vectors and infectious diseases. Change of climate is a contributing factor in the emergence of new species and infectious diseases.
• Biodiversity: Aspects Within the Sphere of Biology Finally, living objects consist of cells, which are the basic units of their function and structure. The viruses’ structure depends on which nucleic acid is included, which denotes that there are DNA and RNA viruses.
• Coral Reef and Biodiversity in Ecosystems Coral reefs are formed only in the tropical zone of the ocean; the temperature limits their life – are from +18 to +29oS, and at the slightest deviation from the boundaries of the coral die.
• Biodiversity and the Health of Ecosystems Various opinions are revealed concerning biodiversity, including the human impact, reversal of biodiversity loss, the impact of overpopulation, the future of biodiversity, and the rate of extinction.
• Wild Crops and Biodiversity Threats However, out of millions of existing types of wild crop cultures, the vast majority have been abandoned and eradicated, as the agricultural companies placed major emphasis on the breeding of domesticated cultures that are easy […]
• Biodiversity, Interdependency: Threatened and Endhangered Species In the above table, humans rely on bees to facilitate pollination among food crops and use their honey as food. Concurrently, lichens break down rocks to provide nutrient-rich soil in the relationship.
• Invasive Processes’ Impact on Ecosystem’s Biodiversity If the invasive ones prove to be more adaptive, this will bring about the oppression of the native species and radical changes in the ecosystem.
• Conserving Biodiversity: The Loggerhead Turtle The loggerhead sea turtle is the species of oceanic turtle which is spread all over the world and belongs to the Cheloniidae family.
• Biodiversity and Dynamics of Mountainous Area Near the House It should be emphasized that the term ecosystem used in this paper is considered a natural community characterized by a constant cycle of energy and resources, the presence of consumers, producers, and decomposers, as well […]
• National Biodiversity Strategy By this decision, the UN seeks to draw the attention of the world community and the leaders of all countries to the protection and rational use of natural resources.
• Rewilding Our Cities: Beauty, Biodiversity and the Biophilic Cities Movement What is the source of your news item? The Guardian.
• Biodiversity and Food Production This paper will analyze the importance of biodiversity in food production and the implications for human existence. Edible organisms are few as compared to the total number of organisms in the ecosystem.
• Restoring the Everglades Wetlands: Biodiversity The Act lays out the functions and roles of the Department of Environmental Protection and the South Florida Water Management District in restoration of the Everglades.
• Biodiversity: Importance and Benefits This is due to the fact that man is evolving from the tendency of valuing long term benefits to a tendency of valuing short terms benefits.
• A Benchmarking Biodiversity Survey of the Inter-Tidal Zone at Goat Island Bay, Leigh Marine Laboratory Within each quadrant, the common species were counted or, in the case of seaweed and moss, proliferation estimated as a percentage of the quadrant occupied.
• Plant Interactions and Biodiversity: Ecological Insights The author is an ecologist whose main area of interest is in the field of biodiversity and composition of the ecosystem.
• Biodiversity: Population Versus Ecosystem Diversity by David Tilman How is the variability of the plant species year to year in the community biomass? What is the rate of the plant productivity in the ecosystem?
• Biodiversity Hotspots and Environmental Ethics The magnitude of the problem of losing biodiversity hotspots is too great, to the extend of extinction of various species from the face of the earth.
• Natural Selection and Biodiversity These are featured by the ways in which the inhabiting organisms adapt to them and it is the existence of these organisms on which the ecosystems depend and therefore it is evident that this diversity […]
• Scientific Taxonomy and Earth’s Biodiversity A duck is a domestic bird that is reared for food in most parts of the world. It is associated with food in the household and is smaller than a bee.
• Global Warming: Causes and Impact on Health, Environment and the Biodiversity Global warming is defined in simple terms as the increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s surface including the air and oceans in recent decades and if the causes of global warming are not […]
• Loss of Biodiversity in the Amazon Ecosystem The growth of the human population and the expansion of global economies have contributed to the significant loss of biodiversity despite the initial belief that the increase of resources can halt the adverse consequences of […]
• California’s Coastal Biodiversity Initiative The considered threat to California biodiversity is a relevant topic in the face of climate change. To prevent this outcome, it is necessary to involve the competent authorities and plan a possible mode of operation […]
• Biodiversity: American Museum of Natural History While staying at the museum, I took a chance to visit the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life and the Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians.
• Biodiversity and Animal Population in Micronesia This means that in the future, the people living in Micronesia will have to move to other parts of the world when their homes get submerged in the water.
• Urban Plants’ Role in Insects’ Biodiversity The plants provide food, shelter and promote the defensive mechanisms of the insects. The observation was also an instrumental method that was used to assess the behavior and the existence of insects in relation to […]
• Biodiversity Markets and Bolsa Floresta Program Environmentalists and scholars of the time led by Lord Monboddo put forward the significance of nature conservation which was followed by implementation of conservation policies in the British Indian forests.
• Brazilian Amazonia: Biodiversity and Deforestation Secondly, the mayor persuaded the people to stop deforestation to save the Amazon. Additionally, deforestation leads to displacement of indigenous people living in the Amazonia.
• Defining and Measuring Biodiversity Biodiversity is measured in terms of attributes that explore the quality of nature; richness and evenness of the living organisms within an ecological niche.
• Biodiversity, Its Importance and Benefits Apart from that, the paper is going to speculate on the most and least diverse species in the local area. The biodiversity can be measured in terms of the number of different species in the […]
• Biodiversity, Its Evolutionary and Genetic Reasons The occurrence of natural selection is hinged on the hypothesis that offspring inherit their characteristics from their parents in the form of genes and that members of any particular population must have some inconsiderable disparity […]
• Biodiversity Hotspots: Evaluation and Analysis The region also boasts with the endangered freshwater turtle species, which are under a threat of extinction due to over-harvesting and destroyed habitat.
• Marine Biodiversity Conservation and Impure Public Goods The fact that the issue concerning the global marine biodiversity and the effects that impure public goods may possibly have on these rates can lead to the development of a range of externalities that should […]
• Natural Sciences: Biodiversity and Human Civilisation The author in conjunction with a team of other researchers used a modelling study to illustrate the fact approximately 2 percent of global energy is currently being deployed in the generation of wind and solar […]
• How Biodiversity Is Threatened by Human Activity Most of the marine biodiversity is found in the tropics, especially coral reefs that support the growth of organisms. Overexploitation in the oceans is caused by overfishing and fishing practices that cause destruction of biodiversity.
• Biodiversity and Business Risk In conclusion, biodiversity risk affects businesses since the loss of biodiversity leads to: coastal flooding, desertification and food insecurity, all of which have impacts on business organizations.
• Measurement of Biodiversity It is the “sum total of all biotic variation from the level of genes to ecosystems” according to Andy Purvus and Andy Hector in their article entitled “Getting the Measure of Diversity” which appeared in […]
• Introduced Species and Biodiversity Rhymer and Simberloff explain that the seriousness of the phenomenon may not be very evident from direct observation of the morphological traits of the species.
• Ecosystems: Biodiversity and Habitat Loss The review of the topic shows that the relationship between urban developmental patterns and the dynamics of ecosystem are concepts that are still not clearly understood in the scholarly world as well as in general.
• The Impact of Burmese Pythons on Florida’s Native Biodiversity Scientists from the South Florida Natural Resource Center, the Smithsonian institute and the University of Florida have undertaken studies to assess the predation behavior of the Burmese pythons on birds in the area.
• Essentials of Biodiversity At the same time, the knowledge and a more informed understanding of the whole concept of biodiversity gives us the power to intervene in the event that we are faced by the loss of biodiversity, […]
• Threat to Biodiversity Is Just as Important as Climate Change This paper shall articulate the truth of this statement by demonstrating that threats to biodiversity pose significant threat to the sustainability of human life on earth and are therefore the protection of biodiversity is as […]
• Cold Water Coral Ecosystems and Their Biodiversity: A Review of Their Economic and Social Value
• Benchmarking DNA Metabarcoding for Biodiversity-Based Monitoring and Assessment
• Prospects for Integrating Disturbances, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Using Microbial Systems
• Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics
• Institutional Economics and the Behaviour of Conservation Organizations: Implications for Biodiversity Conservation
• Fisheries, Fish Pollution and Biodiversity: Choice Experiments With Fishermen, Traders and Consumers
• Last Stand: Protected Areas and the Defense of Tropical Biodiversity
• Hardwiring Green: How Banks Account For Biodiversity Risks and Opportunities
• Governance Criteria for Effective Transboundary Biodiversity Conservation
• Marine Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas for Penguins in Antarctica: Targets for Conservation Action
• Ecological and Economic Assessment of Forests Biodiversity: Formation of Theoretical and Methodological Instruments
• Environment and Biodiversity Impacts of Organic and Conventional Agriculture
• Food From the Water: How the Fish Production Revolution Affects Aquatic Biodiversity and Food Security
• Biodiversity and World Food Security: Nourishing the Planet and Its People
• Climate Change and Energy Economics: Key Indicators and Approaches to Measuring Biodiversity
• Conflicts Between Biodiversity and Carbon Sequestration Programs: Economic and Legal Implications
• Models for Sample Selection Bias in Contingent Valuation: Application to Forest Biodiversity
• Optimal Land Conversion and Growth With Uncertain Biodiversity Costs
• Internalizing Global Externalities From Biodiversity: Protected Areas and Multilateral Mechanisms of Transfer
• Combining Internal and External Motivations in Multi-Actor Governance Arrangements for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
• Balancing State and Volunteer Investment in Biodiversity Monitoring for the Implementation of CBD Indicators
• Differences and Similarities Between Ecological and Economic Models for Biodiversity Conservation
• Globalization and the Connection of Remote Communities: Household Effects and Their Biodiversity Implications
• Shaded Coffee and Cocoa – Double Dividend for Biodiversity and Small-Scale Farmers
• Spatial Priorities for Marine Biodiversity Conservation in the Coral Triangle
• One World, One Experiment: Addressing the Biodiversity and Economics Conflict
• Alternative Targets and Economic Efficiency of Selecting Protected Areas for Biodiversity Conservation in Boreal Forest
• Analysing Multi Level Water and Biodiversity Governance in Their Context
• Agricultural Biotechnology: Productivity, Biodiversity, and Intellectual Property Rights
• Renewable Energy and Biodiversity: Implications for Transitioning to a Green Economy
• Agricultural Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of Major Farming Systems
• Integrated Land Use Modelling of Agri-Environmental Measures to Maintain Biodiversity at Landscape Level
• Changing Business Perceptions Regarding Biodiversity: From Impact Mitigation Towards New Strategies and Practices
• Forest Biodiversity and Timber Extraction: An Analysis of the Interaction of Market and Non-market Mechanisms
• Poverty and Biodiversity: Measuring the Overlap of Human Poverty and the Biodiversity Hotspots
• Protecting Agro-Biodiversity by Promoting Rural Livelihoods
• Maintaining Biodiversity and Environmental Sustainability
• Landscape, Legal, and Biodiversity Threats That Windows Pose to Birds: A Review of an Important Conservation Issue
• Variable Mating Behaviors and the Maintenance of Tropical Biodiversity
• Species Preservation and Biodiversity Value: A Real Options Approach
• What Is Being Done to Preserve Biodiversity and Its Hotspots?
• How Are Argentina and Chile Facing Shared Biodiversity Loss?
• Are Diverse Ecosystems More Valuable?
• How Can Biodiversity Loss Be Prevented?
• Can Payments for Watershed Services Help Save Biodiversity?
• How Can Business Reduce Impacts on the World’s Biodiversity?
• Are National Biodiversity Strategies Appropriate for Building Responsibilities for Mainstreaming Biodiversity Across Policy Sectors?
• How Does Agriculture Effect Biodiversity?
• Are There Income Effects on Global Willingness to Pay For Biodiversity Conservation?
• How Does the Economic Risk Aversion Affect Biodiversity?
• What Are the Threats of Biodiversity?
• How Has the Increased Usage of Synthetic Pesticides Impacted Biodiversity?
• What Does Drive Biodiversity Conservation Effort in the Developing World?
• How Does the Plantation Affect Biodiversity?
• What Does Drive Long-Run Biodiversity Change?
• How Does the United Nations Deal With Biodiversity?
• What Factors Affect Biodiversity?
• How Are Timber Harvesting and Biodiversity Managed in Uneven-Aged Forests?
• When Should Biodiversity Tenders Contract on Outcomes?
• Who Cares About Biodiversity?
• Why Can Financial Incentives Destroy Economically Valuable Biodiversity in Ethiopia?
• What Factors Affect an Area’s Biodiversity?
• In What Ways Is Biodiversity Economically Valuable?
• Which Human Activities Threaten Biodiversity?
• How Can Biodiversity Be Protected?
• In What Ways Is Biodiversity Ecologically Value?
• In Which Countries Is Biodiversity Economically Valuable?
• Does Species Diversity Follow Any Patterns?
• How Is Biodiversity Measured?
• What Is a Biodiversity Hotspot?
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Article Contents

Sampling the undersampled, estimating species’ abundances in space and time, capitalizing on secondary data collection, conclusions, acknowledgments, references cited.

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Three Frontiers for the Future of Biodiversity Research Using Citizen Science Data

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Corey T Callaghan, Alistair G B Poore, Thomas Mesaglio, Angela T Moles, Shinichi Nakagawa, Christopher Roberts, Jodi J L Rowley, Adriana VergÉs, John H Wilshire, William K Cornwell, Three Frontiers for the Future of Biodiversity Research Using Citizen Science Data, BioScience , Volume 71, Issue 1, January 2021, Pages 55–63, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa131

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Citizen science is fundamentally shifting the future of biodiversity research. But although citizen science observations are contributing an increasingly large proportion of biodiversity data, they only feature in a relatively small percentage of research papers on biodiversity. We provide our perspective on three frontiers of citizen science research, areas that we feel to date have had minimal scientific exploration but that we believe deserve greater attention as they present substantial opportunities for the future of biodiversity research: sampling the undersampled, capitalizing on citizen science's unique ability to sample poorly sampled taxa and regions of the world, reducing taxonomic and spatial biases in global biodiversity data sets; estimating abundance and density in space and time, develop techniques to derive taxon-specific densities from presence or absence and presence-only data; and capitalizing on secondary data collection, moving beyond data on the occurrence of single species and gain further understanding of ecological interactions among species or habitats. The contribution of citizen science to understanding the important biodiversity questions of our time should be more fully realized.

Citizen science, or community science, is a rapidly advancing field, with an ever-increasing number of projects (Jordan et al. 2015 , Welvaert and Caley 2016 , Pocock et al. 2017 ). Many of these projects are focused on biodiversity, generally aiming to put points on a map for a given taxon (Pocock et al. 2017 ). We are also in the middle of a big data revolution in ecology and conservation (Farley et al. 2018 ) with increasingly available remote-sensing data (Kwok 2018 ) and trait databases (Schneider et al. 2019 ). For example, citizen science is largely responsible for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) having accumulated approximately 1.4 billion biodiversity records globally (Chandler et al. 2017a ). As of March 2020, data from GBIF has been used in 4307 research papers. Collectively, these data are expanding the spatial and temporal scale of questions that can be answered in ecology, conservation, and natural resource management (McKinley et al. 2017 ).

Despite the opportunities, there are still obstacles blocking widespread use of these data within both academic research and development of government policies (Burgess et al. 2017 , Troudet et al. 2017 , Young et al. 2019 ). Chief among these, unsurprisingly, are questions surrounding data quality, which have been discussed in depth elsewhere (Kosmala et al. 2016 , Aceves-Bueno et al. 2017 ). In the present article, we do not focus on data quality, but rather focus on a series of opportunities that make use of the particular qualities of citizen science data. These opportunities could allow professional scientists to build tools both to better direct the incredible amount of citizen science effort and to better use the rapidly accumulating data sets in biodiversity research (Tulloch et al. 2013b ).

There are many avenues for increasing the utility of citizen science research (Newman et al. 2012 , Bonney et al. 2014 ). In the present article, we focus on three frontiers that we believe present substantial opportunities for progress to advance the field of citizen science and, in particular, to answer fundamental questions important to understanding and conserving biodiversity: (1) using citizen science to increase representation of undersampled regions and taxa, (2) developing pipelines to estimate species’ abundance in space and time, and (3) capitalizing on secondary data collection (i.e., data held in the user contributions but not part of the initial aim of the contribution). These perspectives primarily apply to semistructured and unstructured citizen science projects (e.g., iNaturalist, eBird, FrogID, iSpot) that are largely opportunistic in nature (Shirk et al. 2012 , Danielsen et al. 2014 ). We treat each of these perspectives in turn, by summarizing the current state of literature and providing illustrative examples of how these are being tackled. We conclude by providing a series of key objectives and scientific questions for the future of citizen science within each of these frontiers.

Most citizen science data—across and within projects—have redundancies and gaps in taxonomic focus, space, and time (Boakes et al. 2010 , Bayraktarov et al. 2019 ). Understanding these limitations is extremely important for appropriate use of citizen science data (Burgess et al. 2017 ). However, many of the redundancies and gaps in citizen science data sets (i.e., taxonomic, spatial, and temporal biases) also exist in professional science data sets (Boakes et al. 2010 ). Professional science is often highly constrained by funding, logistics, and time, leading to incomplete biodiversity data sets. In some instances, it is possible that citizen science may do a better job of sampling at least some parts of the world's biodiversity. We suggest that the future of citizen science research should further capitalize on three areas in which citizen science is likely to have invaluable contributions to understanding biodiversity and informing conservation: sampling biodiversity on private land, advancing biodiversity understanding in developing countries and remote areas, and sampling underrepresented taxa.

Biodiversity on private lands may differ from that on public lands (Scott et al. 2001 ) and most endangered species rely, in part, on habitats on private land—many entirely so (Bean and Wilcove 1997 ). Given the large proportion of land that is privately owned (e.g., approximately 60% of the United States, Hilty and Merenlender 2003 ; 63% of Australia, ABS 2002 ; and higher in other parts of the world, Scott et al. 2001 ), sampling biodiversity on private lands is essential to monitor trends in species’ distributions and population status. Professional science is not effective at sampling private lands (Hilty and Merenlender 2003 ), because gaining access is often time consuming and difficult. Citizen science, however, is uniquely positioned to sample biodiversity on private lands—leveraging public citizens and community members to collect large amounts of data, including from their own backyards. As an example, FrogID—a national citizen science project focused on recording frogs in Australia (Rowley et al. 2019 )—has 92% of their records from private lands (from 2017–2019). Citizen science targeting private land is most likely to benefit from backyard contributions, often in residential areas (e.g., Cooper et al. 2007 ). For example, project FeederWatch focuses on backyard birdwatching in the United States, using semiautomated filters to help both participants and researchers have confidence in the data being collected (Bonter and Cooper 2012 ). Whereas Gardenwatch, ran by the British Trust for Ornithology in the United Kingdom, focuses on different missions for individuals to submit data on birds, invertebrates, and mammals in their backyards (BTO 2020 ). However, for larger tracts of land (e.g., agriculture, resource extraction), citizen scientists are likely to face similar access constraints as professional biodiversity monitoring.

Similar biases for citizen science and professional science also apply at the global scale (Yesson et al. 2007 , Boakes et al. 2010 ), because there are many remote or isolated areas that are sparsely populated and rarely visited by either traditional or citizen scientists. Many parts of the world simply do not have the economic resources to fund a scientific establishment. As a result, global scientific databases often have regions of severe data paucity (figure  1 ). For example, global plant trait data sets have sparse information for Siberia, Greenland, northern Canada, arid Australia, parts of Saharan and Central Africa, and much of the Amazon (Kattge et al. 2011 ). Similarly, GBIF has sparse information for Russia, Greenland, northern Canada, Antarctica, parts of Saharan and Central Africa, and for much of the world's oceans. Undersampled areas that are highly diverse, highly endemic, poorly known, or contain highly threatened species or habitats should remain a priority for professional scientists (Tulloch et al. 2013a , Bayraktarov et al. 2019 ). But in combination with professional science, citizen science can help these developing and remote regions to quantify their biodiversity without necessarily building traditional research institutions (e.g., field stations, museums, and universities) in situ . This is parallel to the way that development of mobile phone networks allowed large parts of the world to move from no telecommunications to high connectivity without the establishment of a traditional landline infrastructure (Andrachuk et al. 2019 ). For example, through a collaborative citizen science project in remote Northern Territory, Australia, the Ngukurr community helped to build knowledge about the local biodiversity, including discovering new species, identifying populations of threatened species, and documenting culturally significant habitats ( https://youtu.be/EAnVoA1PB5k ). The Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers (SANBI 2020 ) program supports citizen scientists working in remote parts of South Africa to survey wildflowers.

(a) The total number of records for the top 25 classes present in GBIF, demonstrating the potential for citizen science to capitalize on those undersampled taxa. (b) The total number of records in GBIF, by country, on a log scale, showing the bias toward well-sampled areas (e.g., United States, Europe, Australia). (c) The total number of records in GBIF, standardized by the area of the country, again demonstrating those parts of the world that could most benefit from increased biodiversity knowledge gained through citizen science. (d) The total number of records in GBIF per capita, showing that parts of Europe have the most observations per capita in the world.

In addition to providing local people with the opportunity to document their biodiversity, citizen science is well positioned to make use of records from holidaying biodiversity enthusiasts (Mieras et al. 2017 ). Ecotourism—especially to remote parts of the world—is a growing industry (Das and Chatterjee 2015 ) that has the potential to be combined with citizen science data collection. For example, ecotourists have helped monitor cetaceans in Hawaii by photographing cetaceans while on whale-watching tours (Currie et al. 2018 ), and the CoralWatch citizen science project ( https://coralwatch.org ) has successfully recruited ecotourists to participate in coral reef surveys, with some in relatively remote regions in the world such as Indonesia (Marshall et al. 2012 ). This ecotourism, coupled with artificial intelligence, can now analyze millions of social media posts or online photo repositories to glean information about biodiversity (e.g., wildme.org; Menon et al. 2016 ). Participation with local tourism authorities and managers (e.g., lodge owners, tour guide operators) in these undersampled parts of the world could provide benefits for opportunistic citizen science observations. Furthermore, some companies (e.g., adventurescientists.org) are now targeting dedicated volunteers who are willing to go to remote parts of the world to collect data for specific scientific projects—a unique form of ecotourism blended with citizen science.

Another mechanism by which undersampled regions can be boosted is through global citizen science projects—those that target observations from anywhere in the world, such as iNaturalist ( www.inaturalist.org ). iNaturalist, for example, collates photos of any living organism in the world, allowing for community validation of these photos. Although not formally quantified, there is likely an increase in citizen science observations in these remote and developing parts of the world—contributed both by local naturalists and by ecotourists (Pocock et al. 2019 ). We suggest that experts should optimize their time spent identifying opportunistic observations—for example, in iNaturalist (Tulloch et al. 2013a , Callaghan et al. 2019a )—by prioritizing verification of records from poorly sampled regions (e.g., the tropics, pacific islands) rather than only verifying additional records from well-sampled regions (e.g., United States, Europe; Orr et al. 2020 ).

Taxonomic bias is an inherent feature of organismal research, including biodiversity records, with the representation of taxa in the literature and in biodiversity databases failing to reflect their representation in nature (May 1988 , Bonnet et al. 2002 , Troudet et al. 2017 ). In general, invertebrates tend to be underrepresented in biodiversity databases, and within vertebrates, birds and mammals tend to be overrepresented (May 1988 , Troudet et al. 2017 ). Some reasons for such taxonomic bias are obvious—some organisms are more difficult to study than others because they are difficult to locate or identify. We argue that citizen science projects are well suited to minimize some of these biases. First, identification of any given taxa is no longer dependent on local experts and can be globally exported through platforms such as iNaturalist (Orr et al. 2020 ). For example, there should be increased effort in identifying photographs to a species level by both professional scientists and other experts for given taxa that are not often identified to species (e.g., only 32% of polychaetes on iNaturalist are identified to species; figure  1 ). Second, societal preferences greatly influence taxonomic biases (Czech et al. 1998 , Troudet et al. 2017 ) but professional scientists can work through citizen science initiatives to help minimize and overcome these biases in our biodiversity knowledge. Citizen science has been used to map species distributions of saproxylic beetles (Zapponi et al. 2017 ) and to identify introduced species of Hymenoptera in New Zealand (Ward 2014 ), both examples of uncharismatic invertebrates. Another example is from Jones and colleagues ( 2019 ), who highlight that “iNaturalist was instrumental in facilitating the discovery” of a rare crayfish that was able to successfully be given conservation status, and they state that “had it not been for iNaturalist, its presence may have remained undetected.”

One potential avenue for minimizing taxonomic, and other, biases in citizen science projects is the gamification of citizen science—the process by which participants are rewarded for their sightings in a game-like fashion (e.g., by receiving badges). Gamification may lead to increased retention of current participants, but also recruit new participants to a particular citizen science project (Bowser et al. 2013 , Chandler et al. 2017b ). As an example, to minimize taxonomic biases inherent in citizen science projects, participants could be encouraged to find or identify underrepresented taxa (e.g., invertebrates).

A key benefit of massive citizen science data sets is the ability to monitor biodiversity in space and time at a frequency and geographic extent that has not been possible before (Schmeller et al. 2009 , Tulloch et al. 2013b , Chandler et al. 2017a ). This is key for both detecting range expansions and contractions and understanding the many ways that individual species are responding to the changing world. Because of conservation implications and basic research importance, understanding biodiversity in space and time has received a tremendous amount of research interest both related (Chandler et al. 2017a ) and not related (Gotelli and Colwell 2001 ) to citizen science. Such understanding has traditionally been based on traditional data sets (e.g., museum collections, intensive survey data), however, the increasingly dense sampling of citizen science data sets in both space and time offer both new opportunities and new statistical challenges.

A key future prospect is to estimate organism abundance—with associated uncertainty—in space and time. For semistructured projects that provide complete snapshots of the biodiversity encountered on a survey (e.g., eBird, www.ebird.org ; Reef Life Survey, www.reeflifesurvey.com ), it is straightforward to model abundance of one species at one point in time or space relative to itself at another point in time or space, and indeed, this has already been done for many well-sampled North American bird species (e.g., https://ebird.org/science/status- and-trends; Fink et al. 2010 ). The key information to estimate relative abundance is the existence of true absences in the data set; absences allow modeling of when a species both was and was not encountered in space and time. In this class of data, absences are inferred from complete checklists, in which observers submit lists of all species they were able to identify along with a proxy for effort, allowing for modeling of the probability of presence or absence (e.g., Johnston et al. 2020 ). But these citizen science data have variations in observer skill and effort, as well as observer bias in when and where to sample—problems often true for professionally collected scientific data too. There are already statistical approaches to minimize these biases, such as hierarchical modeling or spatial and temporal subsampling (Gonsamo and D'Odorico 2014 , Johnston et al. 2020 ), and these are continuously being improved.

In contrast, modeling abundance is more difficult if starting from presence-only data, such as those traditionally generated by museum or herbarium records, and more recently many opportunistic citizen science projects (e.g., iNaturalist, FrogID, iSpot, and many others). The lack of absences in these data requires additional analysis steps, and methods to use this class of data more fully are being rapidly developed (Fithian et al. 2015 , Meyer et al. 2015 , Roberts et al. 2017 ). The most powerful of these new approaches is informing the inference from presence-only data sets with high-quality information from another source including plot, distance sampling, or remote-sensing data (He et al. 2015 ). In general, this approach works by statistically combining multiple data sources with different characteristics, such as low quality presence-only citizen science data in combination with high quality professional survey data (Pacifici et al. 2017 ). For example, Fithian and colleagues ( 2015 ) showed that by pooling presence only and presence or absence data together in a complex statistical model, many of the biases in the presence-only data can be minimized. In another example, Pacifici and colleagues ( 2017 ) showed that models of brown-headed nuthatch distributions are improved when incorporating both citizen science data in addition to structured survey data into a synthetic understanding of the species’ range. This promising area of exchange between professional field ecologists, citizen scientists, and statisticians shows how professional scientists could maximize the impact of their limited time in the field by generating data sets specifically designed to unlock aspects of the massive potential of citizen science data. This will require both a full understanding of the statistical approaches used to integrate data (Fithian et al. 2015 , Pacifici et al. 2017 ) and forward-looking statistical models that can dynamically predict where the most valuable data should come from for increased confidence around specific scientific objectives (e.g., Callaghan et al. 2019a , 2019b ). If models can be continuously updated with data from both citizen scientists and professionals, then data gaps in space and time can be identified and filled (Callaghan et al. 2019b ).

Citizen science observations are continuously and globally contributed, in a near real-time fashion. For example, in May 2019, eBird received 7.5 observations per second throughout the entire month. This is a rate of data collection never before seen in ecology and biodiversity research. Species distribution models and abundance models, however, are often treated as static objects in the current scientific literature. As statistical power increases and researchers are able to estimate biodiversity changes in space and time with greater certainty, automated or semiautomated pipelines are being developed that are dynamically updated as data are contributed to the data set (Callaghan et al. 2019a ). This near real-time approach will have the added benefit of detecting sudden declines more quickly (Inger et al. 2015 ), and the temporal scale of updated trends and status will be relevant to a given taxon and likely dependent on the rate of the data being submitted. For example, GreenMaps used broadscale data from GBIF on plant occurrences to develop modeled range maps for more than 190,000 species, which can then be validated by citizen scientists on the basis of the occurrence of each species in the field. This approach can be automated to continuously update the range maps, providing increased confidence surrounding a given species modeled range map. This is similar to global aggregation of all biodiversity records from museum, herbarium, government, and citizen science sources into GBIF. Another example is an automated method developed by the US National Park Service in combination with iNaturalist, which uses citizen science observations integrated with species lists for National Parks to detect species’ responses to climate change (Boydston et al. 2017 ). Pipelines should be prepared on cloud computing platforms as it is becoming increasingly difficult to download, let al.one analyze, the large data sets created by citizen science projects on a personal computer.

Biodiversity research using citizen science has to date largely been focused on recording taxa in time and space—that is, putting biodiversity points on a map (e.g., Adesh et al. 2019 , Humphreys et al. 2019 ). In addition to this main objective of points on a map, many citizen science records, particularly those relying on physical evidence (e.g., photographs or video or audio recordings), contain valuable secondary data such as information about habitat associations or species interactions. We define species observations submitted to citizen science platforms (e.g., iNaturalist, Macaulay Library) with the intention of putting a point on the map as the primary data . Secondary data is any additional information incidentally captured with that primary observation. Image-based records potentially contain a vast amount of information about species interactions with the natural and human environment additional to the primary observation.

Behavior, interspecific interactions, condition (e.g., breeding or health status), traits of an individual (e.g., phenotypes), microhabitat information, or the presence of additional species (e.g., co-occurrence) are examples of secondary data found in citizen science observations (figure  2 ). For example, automatic identification of individual animals has been used to understand the biology, habitat use, and population dynamics of whale sharks (Diamant et al. 2018 , Norman et al. 2017 , McCoy et al. 2018 ), identify individual cetaceans (Weideman et al. 2017 ), and reveal site fidelity in tiger sharks (Paxton et al. 2019 ). Internet images have been used to study commensal relationships between birds and herbivorous mammals (Mikula et al. 2018 ), bird–bird associations (Mikula and Tryjanowski 2016 ), and associations between plant species and pollinating insects (Bahlai and Landis 2016 , Gazdic and Groom 2019 ). Leighton and colleagues ( 2016 ) used Internet images to study the distribution of white morphs of black bears, the distribution of color variants of black sparrowhawks and barn owls, and the hybridization coloration of carrion and hooded crows. Photographs uploaded to iNaturalist have been used to study variation in the wing patterns of damselflies across the species’ geographic extent (Drury et al. 2019 ). The concept of harvesting secondary data from citizen science photographs is similar to the varied unanticipated uses of traditional museum collections (e.g., DNA, understanding DDT prevalence in egg shells) that have been fundamental for ecology and conservation (e.g., Suarez and Tsutsui 2004 , Heberling and Isaac 2017 ). Even without DNA technology fully developed when many museum specimens were originally collected, the technological revolution in DNA analyses have found historical museum specimens instrumental. Photographs contributed by citizen scientists will likely yield similar results, although they are currently difficult to automatically process.

Examples of the diversity of secondary data that can be extracted from biodiversity observations. (a) Community composition: A single image shows the presence of eastern pomfred (Schuettea scalaripinis), yellowtail scad (Trachurus novaezelandiae), grey nurse shark (Carcharias taurus) and painted trumpetfish (Aulostomus chinensis). (b) Species interactions: a jumping jack ant (Myrmecia nigrocincta) is preying on a seed bug (Nysius sp.). (c) Species interaction and phenology: gray hairstreak (Strymon melinus) feeding on a flowering bulltongue arrowhead (Sagittaria lancifolia). (d) Commensalism: Willie Wagtail (Rhipidura leucophrys) foraging for insects from the back of a domestic sheep (Ovis aries) and collecting nesting material.

As quantities of biodiversity data continue to grow exponentially (Farley et al. 2018 ), it is important that robust, open-access infrastructure is implemented to allow appropriate filtering and management of these data (Bayraktarov et al. 2019 ). For example, tools should be implemented to allow identifications to be either shared among citizen scientists (i.e., “crowdsourcing”), reducing the effective workload, or fully automated using machine learning techniques. One such filtering tool is the “Project” feature on iNaturalist. Projects allow the collation of data, allowing grouping by location, taxon or a combination of both. This collation can occur automatically using the observation's metadata (e.g., GPS coordinates), or manually by individual users. The latter represents a form of crowdsourcing as the onus of filtering is on the many observers themselves instead of a single researcher. A recent study in North America, for example, identified bird collision hotspots and informed decisions on mortality prevention through building retrofitting (Winton et al. 2018 ). The data for this study were collated through an iNaturalist project ( www.inaturalist.org/projects/bird-window-collisions ), a framework without which data collation would have been impractical, given there are around 5 million observations of birds on iNaturalist (Van Horn et al. 2018 ). Automated image classification is being implemented across a wide range of projects to extract ecologically valuable information from imagery efficiently and cost effectively (Weinstein 2018 ). Wildbook is an example open-source platform designed to identify individual organisms on the basis of natural markings using deep convolutional neural network machine learning ( http://wildbook.org ). Expanding and replicating automated image classification tools such as those developed by Wildbook is therefore a priority for expediting the collation and analysis of citizen science biodiversity data.

In the present article, we highlight three important future directions for citizen science—among many possible directions—that will help to increase the utility of citizen science data for biodiversity research in the future. Some limitations facing citizen science that we address in the present article include strong societal preferences toward charismatic flora and fauna, a lack of taxonomic expertise in specific taxa to identify images, a lack of funding and technical expertise for citizen science practitioners to develop cloud computing pipelines, and a substantial cost and investment by government and other funding sources to develop automated image recognition technology to harvest secondary data. We believe that the examples presented above help to illustrate that focused collaborations between citizen science participants and professional scientists can overcome these limitations and truly maximize the potential of citizen ­science data.

As these three frontiers continue to be developed, there are a myriad of scientific questions that can be better addressed. In the present article, we highlight six such ­objectives—two pertaining to each of the three frontiers—that we believe will benefit from advances in each of the respective frontiers.

Sampling the undersampled. If citizen scientist can sample enough private land, then we will gain an increased understanding of the role private lands play in biodiversity conservation (e.g., Bean and Wilcove 1997 ). If citizen science and ecotourism can be better linked, then ecotourism projects can both gain valuable data for citizen science projects and bring ecotourism to remote areas with flow-on effects for conservation (e.g., Orams 1995 ).

Estimating species’ abundances in space and time. If professional scientists can build data sets that complement citizen science data, we can identify high priority sites and species that can be used to identify species trends more quickly (Bayraktarov et al. 2019 ). If there are further developments of semiautomated or automated pipelines to interact with citizen scientists in near real time then the collective effort of citizen scientists will be able to reduce redundancies and gaps in the data collected (Callaghan et al. 2019a , 2019b ).

Capitalizing on secondary data collection. If species interactions can be quantified from citizen science photographs at scale, then we can start to better understand the co-occurrence of species in time and space, highlighting key taxa for conservation (e.g., pollination ecology; Domroese and Johnson 2017 ). If a formal review of the secondary data that has to date been harvested from citizen science photographs is conducted, then we can begin to fully understand the potential these data hold for ecology and conservation across taxa and projects.

Citizen science is currently seeing a rapid increase in contributions from volunteers with the number of citizen science projects, and therefore, biodiversity observations are growing exponentially (Pocock et al. 2017 ). We believe that it is time to move past the focus on the limitations of these data (after all, no data are perfect), and begin to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities these data present (Burgess et al. 2017 , Tulloch et al. 2013b ). If professional scientists develop the right tools—presented in the article around three frontiers—citizen science data can be an important part of future advances in ecology, conservation, and biogeography (McKinley et al. 2017 ), dramatically advancing our understanding of global biodiversity.

We thank the thousands of participants of citizen science projects who tirelessly contribute to citizen science projects. Three anonymous reviewers and the editor provided thoughtful comments that substantially improved the manuscript.

Author Biographical

Corey T. Callaghan ( [email protected] ), Thomas Mesaglio, Jodi J. L. Rowley, John H. Wilshire, and William K. Cornwell are affiliated with the Centre for Ecosystem Science, in the School of Biological, Earth, and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Corey T. Callaghan, Alistair G. B. Poore, Angela T. Moles, Shinichi Nakagawa, Christopher Roberts, Adriana Vergés, and William K. Cornwell are affiliated with the Ecology and Evolution Research Centre, in the School of Biological, Earth, and Environmental Sciences, also at the University of New South Wales. Jodi J. L. Rowley is affiliated with the Australian Museum Research Institute, part of the Australian Museum, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

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Barry w. brook.

1 School of Biological Sciences, Private Bag 55, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 7001, Australia

Damien A. Fordham

2 The Environment Institute and School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia

Peer Review Summary

With scientific and societal interest in biodiversity impacts of climate change growing enormously over the last decade, we analysed directions and biases in the recent most highly cited data papers in this field of research (from 2012 to 2014). The majority of this work relied on leveraging large databases of already collected historical information (but not paleo- or genetic data), and coupled these to new methodologies for making forward projections of shifts in species’ geographical ranges, with a focus on temperate and montane plants. A consistent finding was that the pace of climate-driven habitat change, along with increased frequency of extreme events, is outpacing the capacity of species or ecological communities to respond and adapt.

Introduction

It is now halfway through the second decade of the 21 st century, and climate change impact has emerged as a “hot topic” in biodiversity research. In the early decades of the discipline of conservation biology (1970s and 1980s), effort was focused on studying and mitigating the four principal drivers of extinction risk since the turn of the 16 th century, colourfully framed by Diamond 1 as the “evil quartet”: habitat destruction, overhunting (or overexploitation of resources), introduced species, and chains of extinctions (including trophic cascades and co-extinctions). Recent work has also emphasised the importance of synergies among drivers of endangerment 2 . But the momentum to understand how other aspects of global change (such as a disrupted climate system and pollution) add to, and reinforce, these threats has built since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports 3 of 2001 and 2007 and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 4 in 2005.

Scientific studies on the effects of climate change on biodiversity have proliferated in recent decades. A Web of Science ( webofscience.com ) query on the term “biodiversity AND (climate change)”, covering the 14 complete years of the 21 st century, shows the peer-reviewed literature matching this search term has grown from just 87 papers in 2001 to 1,377 in 2014. Figure 1 illustrates that recent scientific interest in climate change-related aspects of biodiversity research has outpaced—in relative terms—the baseline trend of interest in other areas of biodiversity research (i.e., matching the query “biodiversity NOT (climate change)”), with climate-related research rising from 5.5% of biodiversity papers in 2001 to 16.8% in 2014.

Number of refereed papers listed in the Web of Science database that were published between 2001 and 2014 on the specific topic “biodiversity AND (climate change)” (blue line, secondary y-axis) compared to the more general search term “biodiversity NOT (climate change)”.

Interest in this field of research seems to have been driven by a number of concerns. First, there is an increasing societal and scientific consensus on the need to measure, predict (and, ultimately, mitigate) the impact of anthropogenic climate change 5 , linked to the rise of industrial fossil-fuel combustion and land-use change 6 . Biodiversity loss and ecosystem transformations, in particular, have been highlighted as possibly being amongst the most sensitive of Earth’s systems to global change 7 , 8 . Second, there is increasing attention given to quantifying the reinforcing (or occasionally stabilising) feedbacks between climate change and other impacts of human development, such as agricultural activities and land clearing, invasive species, exploitation of natural resources, and biotic interactions 2 , 9 . Third, there has been a trend towards increased accessibility of climate change data and predictions at finer spatio-temporal resolutions, making it more feasible to do biodiversity climate research 10 , 11 .

What are the major directions being taken by the field of climate change and biodiversity research in recent years? Are there particular focal topics, or methods, that have drawn most attention? Here we summarise major trends in the recent highly cited literature of this field.

Filtering and categorising the publications

To select papers, we used the Web of Science indexing service maintained by Thomson Reuters, using the term “biodiversity AND (climate change)” to search within article titles, abstracts, and keywords. This revealed 3,691 matching papers spanning the 3-year period 2012 to 2014. Of these, 116 were categorised by Essential Science Indicators ( esi.incites.thomsonreuters.com ) as being “Highly Cited Papers” (definition: “As of November/December 2014, this highly cited paper received enough citations to place it in the top 1% of [its] academic field based on a highly cited threshold for the field and publication year”), with five also being classed as “Hot Papers” (definition: “Published in the past two years and received enough citations in November/December 2014 to place it in the top 0.1% of papers in [its] academic field”). The two academic fields most commonly associated with these selected papers were “Plant & Animal Science” and “Environment/Ecology”.

Next we ranked each highly cited paper by year, according to its total accumulated citations through to April 1 2015, and then selected the top ten papers from each year (2012, 2013 and 2014) for detailed assessment. We wished to focus on data-oriented research papers, so only those labelled “Article” (Document Type) were considered, with “Review”, “Editorial”, or other non-research papers being excluded from our final list. Systematic reviews that included a formal meta-analysis were, however, included. We then further vetted each potential paper based on a detailed examination of its content, and rejected those articles for which the topics of biodiversity or climate change constituted only a minor component, or where these were only mentioned in passing (despite appearing in the abstract or key words).

The final list of 30 qualifying highly cited papers is shown in Table 1 , ordered by year and first author. The full bibliographic details are given, along with a short description of the key message of the research (a subjective summary, based on our interpretation of the paper). Each paper was categorised by methodological type, the aspect of climate change that was the principal focus, the spatial and biodiversity scale of the study units, the realm, biome and taxa under study, the main ecological focus, and the research type and application (the first row of Table 1 lists possible choices that might be allocated within a given categorisation). Note that our choice of categories for the selected papers was unavoidably idiosyncratic, in this case being dictated largely by the most common topics that appeared in the reviewed papers. Other emphases, such as non-temperature-related drivers of global change, evolutionary responses, and so on, might have been more suitable for other bodies of literature. We also did not attempt to undertake any rigorous quantification of effect sizes in reported responses of biodiversity to climate change; such an approach would have required a systematic review and meta-analysis, which was beyond the scope of this overview of highly cited papers.

Summary of the ten most highly cited research papers based on the search term: “biodiversity AND (climate change)”, for each of 2012 9 , 13 , 14 , 23 , 26 , 32 , 34 , 36 , 40 , 45 , 2013 15 – 17 , 21 , 27 , 30 , 31 , 33 , 37 , 39 and 2014 18 – 20 , 22 , 24 , 25 , 28 , 29 , 35 , 38 , as determined in the ISI Web of Science database. Filters : Reviews, commentaries, and opinion pieces were excluded, as were papers for which climate change was not among the focal topics of the research. The first row of the Table is a key that shows the possible categorisations that were open to selection (more than one description might be selected for a given paper); n is the number of times a category term was allocated.

Analysis of trends, biases and gaps

Based on the categorisation frequencies in Table 1 (counts are given in the n columns adjacent to each category), the “archetypal” highly cited paper in biodiversity and climate change research relies on a database of previously collated information, makes an assessment based on future forecasts of shifts in geographical distributions, is regional in scope, emphasises applied-management outcomes, and uses terrestrial plant species in temperate zones as the study unit.

Many papers also introduced new methodological developments, studied montane communities, took a theoretical-fundamental perspective, and considered physiological, population dynamics, and migration-dispersal aspects of ecological change. Plants were by far the dominant taxonomic group under investigation. By contrast, relatively few of the highly cited paper studies used experimental manipulations or network analysis; lake, river, island and marine systems were rarely treated; nor did they focus on behavioural or biotic interactions. Crucially, none of the highly cited papers relied on paleoclimate reconstructions or genetic information, despite the potential value of such data for model validation and contextualisation 12 . Such data are crucial in providing evidence for species responses to past environmental changes, specifying possible limits of adaptation (rate and extent) and fundamental niches, and testing theories of biogeography and macroecology.

At the time of writing, 5 of the 30 highly cited papers listed in Table 1 (16%) also received article recommendations from Faculty of 1000 experts ( f1000.com/prime/recommendations ) 9 , 13 – 16 with none of the most recent (2014) highly cited papers having yet received an F1000 Prime endorsement.

Key findings of the highly cited paper collection for 2012–2014

A broad conclusion of the highly cited papers for 2012–2014 (drawn from the “main message” summaries described in Table 1 ) is that the pace of climate change-forced habitat change, coupled with the increased frequency of extreme events 15 , 17 and synergisms that arise with other threat drivers 9 , 18 and physical barriers 19 , is typically outpacing or constraining the capacity of species, communities, and ecosystems to respond and adapt 20 , 21 . The combination of these factors leads to accumulated physiological stresses 13 , 15 , 22 , might have already induced an “extinction debt” in many apparently viable resident populations 14 , 23 – 25 , and is leading to changing community compositions as thermophilic species displace their more climate-sensitive competitors 13 , 26 . In addition to atmospheric problems caused by anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions, there is mounting interest in the resilience of marine organisms to ocean acidification 27 , 28 and altered nutrient flows 16 .

Although models used to underpin the forecasts of climate-driven changes to biotic populations and communities have seen major advances in recent years, as a whole the field still draws from a limited suite of methods, such as ecological niche models, matrix population projections and simple measures of change in metrics of ecological diversity 7 , 12 , 29 . However, new work is pushing the field in innovative directions, including a focus on advancements in dynamic habitat-vegetation models 30 – 32 , improved frameworks for projecting shifts in species distributions 29 , 33 , 34 and how this might be influenced by competition or predation 35 , 36 , and analyses that seek to identify ecological traits that can better predict the relative vulnerability of different taxa to climate change 37 , 38 .

In terms of application of the research to conservation and policy, some offer local or region-specific advice on ecosystem management and its integration with other human activities (e.g., agriculture, fisheries) under a changing climate 18 , 24 , 35 , 39 . However, the majority of the highly cited papers used some form of forecasting to predict the consequences of different climate-mitigation scenarios (or business-as-usual) on biodiversity responses and extinctions 20 – 22 , 33 , 40 , so as to illustrate the potentially dire consequences of inaction.

Future directions

The current emphasis on leveraging large databases for evidence of species responses to observed (recent) climate change is likely to wane as existing datasets are scrutinised repeatedly. This suggests to us that future research will be forced to move increasingly towards the logistically more challenging experimental manipulations (laboratory, mesocosm, and field-based). The likelihood of this shift in emphasis is reinforced by the recent trend towards mechanistic models in preference to correlative approaches 41 . Such approaches arguably offer the greatest potential to yield highly novel insights, especially for predicting and managing the outcomes of future climate-ecosystem interactions that have no contemporary or historical analogue. Along with this work would come an increasing need for systematic reviews and associated meta-analysis, to summarise these individual studies quantitatively and use the body of experiments to test hypotheses.

Technological advances will also drive this field forward. This includes the development of open-source software and function libraries that facilitate and standardise routine tasks like validation and sensitivity analysis of projection or statistical models 42 , 43 , as well as improved access to data layers from large spatio-temporal datasets like ensemble climate forecasts 10 and palaeoclimatic hindcasts 44 . An increasing emphasis on cloud-based storage and use of off-site high-performance parallel computing infrastructure will make it realistic for researchers to undertake computationally intensive tasks 31 from their desktop.

These approaches are beginning to emerge, and a few papers on these topics already appear in the highly cited paper list ( Table 1 ). This includes the innovative exposure of coral populations to varying carbon dioxide concentrations, and the meta-analyses of tundra plant response to experimental warming 45 and marine organisms to ocean chemistry 27 . Such work must also be underpinned by improved models of the underlying mechanisms and dynamic processes, ideally using multi-species frameworks that make use of ensemble forecasting methods for improved incorporation of scenario and climate model uncertainty 10 . Such an approach can account better for biotic interactions 41 via individual-based and physiologically explicit “bottom-up” models of adaptive responses 31 . Lastly, there must be a greater emphasis on using genetic information to integrate eco-evolutionary processes into biodiversity models 46 , and on improving methods for making the best use of retrospective knowledge from palaeoecological data 12 .

[version 1; referees: 2 approved]

Funding Statement

This work was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP120101019 (Brook) and Future Fellowship FT140101192 (Fordham).

Referee response for version 1

Bernhard schmid.

1 Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, CH-8057, Switzerland

I have read this submission. I believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.

Jonathan Rhodes

1 Landscape Ecology and Conversation Group, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld, Australia

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• Published: 28 May 2024

Biodiversity and food systems

Nature Food volume  5 ,  page 341 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Biological diversity and food availability are intrinsically linked, yet trade-offs between them often arise. Further research is needed on the specific issues faced in different contexts and what could help overcome them.

The International Day for Biological Diversity, celebrated annually on 22 May, marks the date when the text of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was adopted back in 1992. Besides raising awareness around the value and importance of biodiversity, it also fosters actions to protect it.

The sixth edition of the CBD, to be held in Colombia in October, dedicates unprecedented attention to the food–biodiversity nexus. Among the topics that will be covered are (1) ‘Food systems depend on biodiversity and ecosystem services’; (2) ‘Agriculture must be part of the solution, not the problem’; (3) Biodiversity underpins all fishing and aquaculture activities’; and (4) ‘Genetic diversity: the hidden secret of life’. These topics underscore the impact that food production and consumption have on biodiversity while at the same time depending on it, as well as the potential to transform this relationship through regenerative practices with mutually positive outcomes.

The agreement reached in the previous edition of the CBD in Montreal includes targets to protect 30% of Earth, reform US $500 billion (£410 billion) of environmentally damaging subsidies, and address and disclose the impact businesses. While there is no doubt that this is an important advancement, decisions related to policy design and implementation in specific contexts still require a deeper understanding of the issues faced and what is required to overcome them.

Most of the primary research content featured in the May issue of Nature Food — regardless of their primary focus — offers some contribution to the topics listed above. Two articles focus on the impacts of food security on biodiversity. Wen and colleagues show how uneven agricultural contraction within fast-urbanizing urban agglomeration has decreased nitrogen-use efficiency and food system sustainability in China. Nitrogen losses cause air and water pollution, harming life on land and in water. Zhou and colleagues analyse the global dissemination of Salmonella enterica associated with centralized pork industrialization . Intensive farming and global transportation have particularly reshaped the pig industry, leading to the spread of associated zoonotic pathogens that can cause severe food-borne infections.

Three more articles illustrate practices that would reduce the impact of food systems on biodiversity. Gu and colleagues show how selected agricultural management practices in China can enhance nitrogen sustainability and benefit human health. Lynch et al. estimate that the harvest from inland recreational fishing equates to just over one-tenth of all reported inland fisheries catch at a global level, highlighting the potential contribution of inland recreational fisheries to food security. Finally, Simon et al. examine how redesigning food systems according to circularity principles can support current European protein intake levels while reducing land use and greenhouse gas emissions — both vital to fauna and flora.

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The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group studies the structure, function and change of terrestrial ecosystems by using plants, vegetation and soil as integrative key features in landscape ecology. Processes of global change especially of man-made climate and land use changes as well as changes in biogeochemical cycles are studied on local and regional scale with regard to their importance for conservation of biodiversity and sustainable use of natural resources.

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People are altering decomposition rates in waterways

Faster decomposition could exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions, threaten biodiversity.

Humans may be accelerating the rate at which organic matter decomposes in rivers and streams on a global scale, according to a new study from the University of Georgia, Oakland University and Kent State University.

That could pose a threat to biodiversity in waterways around the world and increase the amount of carbon in Earth's atmosphere, potentially exacerbating climate change.

Published in Science, the study is the first to combine a global experiment and predictive modeling to illustrate how human impacts to waterways may contribute to the global climate crisis.

"Everyone in the world needs water," said Krista Capps, co-author of the study and an associate professor in UGA's Odum School of Ecology and Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. "When human activities change the fundamental ways rivers work, it's concerning. Increases in decomposition rates may be problematic for the global carbon cycle and for animals, like insects and fish, that live in streams because the food resources they need to survive will disappear more quickly, lost to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide."

Global warming, urbanization, increased nutrients altering global carbon cycle

Rivers and streams play a key role in the global carbon cycle by storing and decomposing large amounts of leaves, branches and other plant matter.

Typically, the process would go something like this: Leaf falls into river. Bacteria and fungi colonize the leaf. An insect eats the bacteria and fungi, using the carbon stored in the leaf to grow and make more insects. A fish eats the insect.

The study found that this process is changing in areas of the world impacted by humans.

Rivers impacted by urbanization and agriculture are changing how quickly leaf litter decomposes.

And when the process speeds up, that insect doesn't have a chance to absorb the carbon from the leaf. Instead, the carbon is released into the atmosphere, contributing to greenhouse gas pollution and ultimately disrupting the food chain.

"When we think of greenhouse gas emissions, we tend to think of tailpipes and factories," said Scott Tiegs, co-author of the study and a professor of biological sciences at Oakland. "But a lot of carbon dioxide and methane comes from aquatic ecosystems. This process is natural. But when humans add nutrient pollution like fertilizer to fresh waters and elevate water temperatures, we increase the decomposition rates and direct more CO2 into the atmosphere."

Reducing human impact could improve water quality, help fight climate change

The researchers collected field data from 550 rivers across the globe, collaborating with more than 150 researchers in 40 countries.

Based on that data, the scientists generated one of the first estimates of decomposition rates in rivers and streams throughout the world, including understudied areas such as the tropics.

The authors compiled the data into a free online mapping tool that shows how fast different kinds of leaves decompose in local waterways.

Using predictive modeling, the researchers also identified environmental factors responsible for increased decomposition rates, such as higher temperatures and increased nutrient concentrations.

"Both of these factors are impacted by human activities," said David Costello, co-author of the study and an associate professor at Kent State. "Reducing human impacts on decomposition will keep more carbon in rivers, preventing it from entering the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and contributing to climate change."

The study was co-authored by John Paul Schmidt, from UGA's Odum School of Ecology; Christopher J. Patrick, Virginia Institute of Marine Science; Jennifer J. Follstad Shah, University of Utah; Carrie J. LeRoy, The Evergreen State College; and the CELLDEX Consortium.

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Materials provided by University of Georgia . Original written by Leigh Hataway. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• S. D. Tiegs, K. A. Capps, D. M. Costello, J. P. Schmidt, C. J. Patrick, J. J. Follstad Shah, C. J. LeRoy, Vicenç Acuña, Ricardo Albariño, Daniel C. Allen, Cecilia Alonso, Patricio Andino, Clay Arango, Jukka Aroviita, Marcus V.M. Barbosa, Leon A. Barmuta, Colden Baxter, Brent Bellinger, Luz Boyero, Lyubov Bragina, Lee E. Brown, Andreas Bruder, Denise A. Bruesewitz, Francis Burdon, Marcos Callisto, Antonio Camacho, Cristina Canhoto, María M. Castillo, Eric Chauvet, Joanne Clapcott, Fanny Colas, Checo Colón-Gaud, Julien Cornut, Verónica Crespo-Pérez, Wyatt F. Cross, Joseph Culp, Michael Danger, Olivier Dangles, Elvira de Eyto, Alison M. Derry, Veronica Díaz Villanueva, Michael M. Douglas, Arturo Elosegi, Andrea C. Encalada, Sally Entrekin, Rodrigo Espinosa, Verónica Ferreira, Carmen Ferriol, Kyla M. Flanagan, Alexander S. Flecker, Tadeusz Fleituch, André Frainer, Nikolai Friberg, Paul C. Frost, Erica A. Garcia, Liliana García-Lago, Pavel Ernesto García Soto, Mark O. Gessner, Sudeep Ghate, Darren P. Giling, Alan Gilmer, José Francisco Gonçalves, Rosario Karina Gonzales, Manuel A.S. Graça, Mike Grace, Natalie A. Griffiths, Hans-Peter Grossart, François Guérold, Vlad Gulis, Pablo E. Gutiérrez-Fonseca, Luiz U. Hepp, Scott Higgins, Takuo Hishi, Joseph Huddart, John Hudson, Moss Imberger, Carlos Iñiguez-Armijos, Mark W. Isken, Tomoya Iwata, David J. Janetski, Andrea E. Kirkwood, Aaron A. Koning, Sarian Kosten, Kevin A. Kuehn, Hjalmar Laudon, Peter R. Leavitt, Aurea L Lemes da Silva, Shawn Leroux, Peter J. Lisi, Richard MacKenzie, Amy M. Marcarelli, Frank O. Masese, Peter B. McIntyre, Brendan G. McKie, Adriana Medeiros, Kristian Meissner, Marko Miliša, Shailendra Mishra, Yo Miyake, Ashley Moerke, Shorok Mombrikotb, Rob Mooney, Timothy Moulton, Timo Muotka, Junjiro Negishi, Vinicius Neres-Lima, Mika L. Nieminen, Jorge Nimptsch, Jakub Ondruch, Riku Paavola, Isabel Pardo, Edwin T.H.M. Peeters, Jesus Pozo, Aaron Prussian, Estefania Quenta, Brian Reid, John S. Richardson, Anna Rigosi, José Rincón, Geta Risnoveanu, Christopher T. Robinson, Lorena Rodríguez-Gallego, Todd V. Royer, James A. Rusak, Anna C. Santamans, Géza B. Selmeczy, Gelas Simiyu, Agnija Skuja, Jerzy Smykla, Ryan Sponseller, Kandikere R. Sridhar, Aaron Stoler, Christopher M. Swan, Franco Teixeira de Mello, Jonathan D. Tonkin, Sari Uusheimo, Allison M. Veach, Sirje Vilbaste, Lena B.-M. Vought, Chiao-Ping Wang, Jackson R. Webster, Paul B. Wilson, Stefan Woelfl, Guy Woodward, Marguerite A. Xenopoulos, Adam G. Yates, Chihiro Yoshimura, Catherine M. Yule, Yixin Zhang, Jacob A. Zwart. Human activities shape global patterns of decomposition rates in rivers . Science , 2024; DOI: 10.1126/science.adn1262

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How the freshly selected regional centres will bolster the implementation of the Biodiversity Plan

At the fourth meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI 4) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Parties selected 18 regional organizations spanning the globe in a multilateral push to bolster the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, also known as the Biodiversity Plan , through science, technology and innovation:

• Africa: The Central African Forest Commission (COMIFAC), the Ecological Monitoring Center (CSE), the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), the Sahara and Sahel Observatory (OSS), and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI).
• Americas: The Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute, the Secretariat of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and the Central American Commission on Environment and Development (CCAD).
• Asia: ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB); IUCN Asia Regional Office; IUCN Regional Office for West Asia (ROWA); Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences (NIES); Regional Environmental Centre for Central Asia (CAREC).
• Europe: European Commission - Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC); IUCN Centre for Mediterranean Cooperation; IUCN Regional Office for Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECARO); Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences (RBINS).
• Oceania: The Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP).

Here are five facts about the selection of these centres and the way they will bring the Parties to the CBD closer to halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030 :

1. Nested in existing institutions for efficiency and rapid deployment

The selected centres are hosted by existing institutions that have responded to the CBD Secretariat’s call for expression of interest. The applications received translate a global commitment to implementing the Biodiversity Plan. This global network of centres forms part of the technical and scientific cooperation mechanism under the CBD. They will contribute to filling gaps in international cooperation and catering to the needs of countries in the regions that they cover.

2. One-stop-shop for scientific, technical and technological support

The mandate of the centres is to catalyse technical and scientific cooperation among the Parties to the Convention in the geographical regions they cover. The support they offer may include the sharing of scientific knowledge, data, expertise, resources, technologies, including indigenous and traditional technologies, and technical know-how with relevance to the national implementation of the 23 targets of the Biodiversity Plan. Other forms of capacity building and development may also be provided.

3. Complementarity with existing initiatives

The expected contributions of the centres will constitute a surge of capacity, complementing small-scale initiatives for technical and scientific cooperation among its Parties through programmes such as the Bio-Bridge Initiative . The newly selected centres will expand, scale-up and accelerate efforts in support of the implementation of the Biodiversity Plan.

4. Delivering field support tailored to regional specificities

Countries around the world face well recognized challenges in aligning with universally agreed targets while considering biophysical specificities and national circumstances. The regional centres will provide regionally appropriate solutions.

5. Building on and amplifying existing cooperation

Many examples around the world demonstrate the benefits of transboundary cooperation. In South Africa, the “Black Mambas” Anti-Poaching Unit has benefited from Dutch expertise in fitting rhinoceros with subcutaneous sensors and horn transmitters to track their movements across the Greater Kruger National Park.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, non-governmental organization Corales de Paz (Colombia) shared their “Caribbean Reef Check” methodology and “Reef Repair Diver “programs with Ecuador-based CONMAR. Participants in CONMAR-organized training camps could thus benefit from expertise in coral reef monitoring and coral gardening.

The newly selected centres will seek to expand this constellation of bright spots of cooperation for nature and for people.

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