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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2023.03.09.531981

Spatial and temporal representation of marine fish occurrences available online

Pizarro, V.·Castillo, A.·Pinones, A.·Samaniego, H.
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Abstract

Despite the 243,000 species of marine species described by 2022, our knowledge about the biodiversity in the oceans is still incomplete. This may have dreaded and detrimental effect for the conservation of marine ecosystems under the current anthropization of our biota and the fast pacing climate and global change scenario. However, a large number of online repositories cataloging, storing and distributing biodiversity information hosting taxonomic information and species occurrence data have emerged recently. FishBase, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) are part of these publicly available repositories representing a variety of sources that have exploded in number. However, despite the incredible accumulation of biodiversity records, not all the information is really useful, nor does it represent any new knowledge regarding global species richness patterns. In this study we evaluated the spatial and temporal representativeness of the records of marine fishes (order Actinopterygii) available in the GBIF and OBIS global repositories. We provide a methodological framework based on a set of non-parametric estimators to calculate species richness from incidence data, using hexagonal grids as sampling units overlapped on the marine bioregions worldwide. Using standard ecological and spatial analysis tools, we identify regions that are adequately represented in terms of available records and therefore have more reliable data, as well as regions with few records that do not represent current species richness. We overlap these results with the location of marine protected areas and fishing exploitation zones to understand the anthropogenic effect on marine ichthyofauna. We additionally evaluate hypotheses regarding the taxonomic, geographic, and temporal distribution of information biases to deepen our current understanding of public records of species occurrences worldwide. Considering that more than 40 years of information was analyzed, the results showed that on a global scale, the primary data on marine fish available on GBIF and OBIS platforms are still far from being representative and complete. Only 1.14% of the records were useful for our analyses. In addition, we found that the information seems to be biased towards coastal areas, regions close to developed countries and areas where there is a large fishing activity. Finally, the best represented species and families are those with a small body size, which use shallow habitats and have commercial cultural value.

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Pizarro, V., Castillo, A., Pinones, A., Samaniego, H.. 2023-03-12. Spatial and temporal representation of marine fish occurrences available online. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.09.531981

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