Drivers of species knowledge across the Tree of Life

Abstract

ABSTRACTKnowledge of biodiversity is unevenly distributed across the Tree of Life. In the long run, such disparity in awareness unbalances our understanding of life on Earth, influencing policy decisions and the allocation of research and conservation funding. We investigated how humans accumulate knowledge of biodiversity by searching for consistent relationships between scientific (number of publications) and societal (number of views in Wikipedia) interest, and species-level morphological, ecological and socio-cultural factors. Across a random selection of 3,019 species spanning 29 Phyla/Divisions, we show that socio-cultural factors are the most important correlates of scientific and societal interest in biodiversity, including the fact that a species is useful or harmful to humans, has a common name and is listed in the IUCN Red List. Furthermore, large-bodied, broadly distributed and taxonomically unique species receive more scientific and societal attention, whereas colorfulness and phylogenetic proximity to humans correlates exclusively with societal attention. These results highlight a favoritism towards limited branches of the Tree of Life, and that scientific and societal priorities in biodiversity research broadly align. This suggests that we may be missing out on key species in our research and conservation agenda simply because they are not on our cultural radar.