Will Africa meet the challenge of biodiversity conservation in the digital age?

Abstract

Abstract Digital accessible knowledge (DAK) is of utmost importance for biodiversity conservation; indeed, its use is indispensable to provide evidence and strategies to support decision-making on natural resource management and sustainable use. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, www.gbif.org) is a mega data infrastructure with more than two billion and two hundred million occurrence records as of 17 January 2023. It is by far the largest initiative assembling and sharing DAK to support scientific research, conservation, and sustainable development. We decided to analyze plant data published at the GBIF site at the scale of Africa. We intend to highlight the contribution of the continent to the GBIF and thereby underline data gaps across taxonomic groups, the basis of records, and geographic space. To achieve our purpose, we downloaded data on 17th January 2023 from the Plantae kingdom from Africa. They are available at https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.p2n6um. We achieved data treatment and analysis using R, several packages and related functions. Although Africa is home to rich biodiversity with many hotspots, the global data contribution of Africa to the GBIF (61,176,994 as of 17th January 2023) is still incredibly low (2.69%). Furthermore, there are huge disparities between African countries, with South Africa contributing alone for 50.64% of the data of the continent. The plant data of Africa (9,116,401 occurrence records) accounted for 14.90% of the data of the continent; this underlines huge gaps between taxonomic groups. Furthermore, Magnoliopsida was the dominant plant class with the highest number of records (71.07%) and the highest number of species (68.36%), followed by Liliopsida, with 22.80% of the records and 19.06% of the species. Two sources of records were dominant: preserved specimens (59.68%) and human observation (30.86%). In geographic space, plant data gaps are also quite large across the continent at either spatial resolution (half degree or one degree spatial grid cells); data completeness is more achieved in West Africa, Southern Africa, East Africa, and Madagascar. The large multidimensional data gaps identified in this study should be in priority addressed in future data collections. Accessibility by roads and large protected areas (> 10,000 Km²) are limiting factors of data completeness across the continent. We deplored important data loss during the process of data cleaning; indeed, the number of data determined up to species level was 7,570,244 and accounted for 83.04% of the initial data; the number of records with adequate coordinates was 6,461,460 and accounted for 70.88% of the initial data; while the data fitness for purpose in completeness analysis (records determined up to species level, with adequate coordinates, and full dates) were only 4,643,586 making approximately 50.94% of the total data records initially downloaded from GBIF site. Efforts for quality check before data publication on GBIF site are still important across African countries.