sampbias, a method for quantifying geographic sampling biases in species distribution data
Name
ecog.05102.pdf
Description
visibility:open
Size
1.09 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (CRC64NVME)
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Resource type
Journal article
Creator (person)
Zizka, Alexander
Antonelli, Alexandre
Silvestro, Daniele
Date published
October 8, 2020
Abstract
Geo‐referenced species occurrences from public databases have become essential to biodiversity research and conservation. However, geographical biases are widely recognized as a factor limiting the usefulness of such data for understanding species diversity and distribution. In particular, differences in sampling intensity across a landscape due to differences in human accessibility are ubiquitous but may differ in strength among taxonomic groups and data sets. Although several factors have been described to influence human access (such as presence of roads, rivers, airports and cities), quantifying their specific and combined effects on recorded occurrence data remains challenging. Here we present sampbias, an algorithm and software for quantifying the effect of accessibility biases in species occurrence data sets. sampbias uses a Bayesian approach to estimate how sampling rates vary as a function of proximity to one or multiple bias factors. The results are comparable among bias factors and data sets. We demonstrate the use of sampbias on a data set of mammal occurrences from the island of Borneo, showing a high biasing effect of cities and a moderate effect of roads and airports. sampbias is implemented as a well‐documented, open‐access and user‐friendly R package that we hope will become a standard tool for anyone working with species occurrences in ecology, evolution, conservation and related fields.
Journal title
Ecography
Publisher
Wiley
ISSN
0906-7590
eISSN
1600-0587
Official URL
Rights statement
In Copyright