New species discoveries redefine global biodiversity patterns

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Global biodiversity patterns are fundamental to ecology and conservation. However, these patterns are based on incomplete and rapidly growing taxonomic knowledge, and the influence of new species discoveries on our understanding of global biodiversity remains poorly understood. Here we quantified how the discovery of terrestrial vertebrates from 1920 to 2020 has reshaped estimated global diversity patterns and their inferred environmental drivers. New species discoveries were overwhelmingly concentrated in the tropics. For well-studied taxa such as birds, estimated diversity patterns remained largely stable, but reptiles and amphibians showed major reconfiguration: 20.3% and 31.7% of their respective diversity centers (top 5% of range-weighted rarity) shifted to new regions, including parts of Australia and Southeast Asia. These reconfigurations were accompanied by marked changes in inferred environmental drivers, with the apparent influence of temperature on richness declining and precipitation gaining importance. Our findings suggest that estimated global diversity patterns and driver relationships for poorly studied groups may be less reliable than often assumed. Consequently, projections of biodiversity change that rely mainly on temperature risk compromising conservation strategies. Our study calls for “more boots on the ground” to accelerate species discoveries and close critical biodiversity knowledge gaps. https://doi.org/10.32942/X21H1G Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology terrestrial vertebrate, amphibian, Linnean shortfall, diversity center, diversity-environment relationship Published: 2025-12-03 13:45 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: Species range maps are availability from several public repositories: birds from the Handbook of the Birds of the World and BirdLife International version 7 (https://datazone.birdlife.org); mammals and amphibians from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (https://www.iucnredlist.org/); and reptiles from ref. 5 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0332-2). Taxonomic data are available as follows: birds from the Handbook of the Birds of the World and BirdLife International version 7 (https://datazone.birdlife.org); mammals from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (https://www.iucnredlist.org/) and The Mammal Diversity Database (https://www.mammaldiversity.org/); reptiles from The Reptile Database (https://reptile-database.org/); amphibians from the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (https://www.iucnredlist.org/) and Amphibian Species of the World 6.2 (https://amphibiansoftheworld.amnh.org/). Language: English