Marques, M. C. M. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2025

From smartphones to satellites: Uniting crowdsourced biodiversity monitoring and Earth observation to fill the gaps in global plant trait mapping

Plant functional traits are fundamental to ecosystem dynamics and Earth system processes, but their global characterization is limited by the availability of field surveys and trait measurements. Recent expansions in biodiversity data aggregation, including large collections of vegetation surveys, citizen science observations, and trait measurements, offer new opportunities to overcome these constraints. Here we demonstrate that combining these diverse data sources with high-resolution Earth observation data enables accurate modeling of key plant traits at up to 1 km resolution. Our approach achieves high predictive power, reaching correlations up to 0.63 (15 of 31 traits exceeding 0.50) and improved spatial transferability, effectively bridging gaps in under-sampled regions. By capturing a broad range of traits with high spatial coverage, these maps can enhance our understanding of plant community properties and ecosystem functioning globally, and can serve as useful tools in modeling global biogeochemical processes and informing worldwide conservation efforts. Ultimately, our framework highlights the power and necessity of crowdsourced biodiversity data in high-resolution plant trait modeling. We anticipate that advancements in biodiversity data collection and remote sensing capabilities will further refine global trait mapping, fostering a dynamic trait-based understanding of the biosphere.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2020

Minding The Gap: Range Size And Economic Use Drive Functional Trait Data Shortfall In The Atlantic Forest

Biodiversity shortfalls are knowledge gaps that may result from uneven sampling through time and space and human interest biases. Gaps in data of functional traits of species may add uncertainty in functional diversity and structure measures and hinder inference on ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services, with negative implications for conservation and restoration practices, such as in Atlantic Forest hotspot. Here we investigate which are the potential drivers of trait data gaps and where geographically they are in the Atlantic Forest. We quantified trait gaps for four key plant functional traits of 2335 trees species, and evaluated which factors drive trait gap at the species and at the geographical level. At the species level, we found larger trait gaps for small-ranged and with no economic use. At the geographical level, we found larger gaps at the Atlantic Forest east coast. Trait gaps were higher away from urban areas, and among species with smaller mean range size and smaller mean economic use of wood, and smaller near protected areas. Efforts on reducing trait gaps of small-ranged and of species with economic use of wood can further advance theory-driven studies and improve knowledge coverage

ecology↗