Long-standing biases in research to conserve biodiversity

Efforts to conserve biodiversity have been hampered by long-standing biases, including a disproportionate focus on particular taxa and ecosystems with minimal attention to underlying genetic diversity.

A new study, published in Cell Reports Sustainability, shows the persistence of long-standing biases in research to conserve biodiversity. These biases remain and will ultimately lead to uneven loss of biodiversity as understudied groups decline and disappear - some species before they are even identified and described. Understanding how current conservation practices, funding allocation processes, and researchers themselves reinforce these biases should help level the playing field across taxa and ecosystems.

Áki Jarl Láruson, population geneticst at the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute, is the lead contact for this research, which was done in collaboration with researchers from Australia, USA, the Netherlands, among others.

Specifically, increasing the amount of funding allocated to understudied species and ecosystems will ensure a more equitable effort to conserve biodiversity across scales and help address impediments to United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity targets.

Efforts to conserve biodiversity have been hampered by long-standing biases, including a disproportionate focus on particular taxa and ecosystems with minimal attention to underlying genetic diversity. These biases, that were assessed in the study, have persisted over the past four decades by analyzing trends in 17,502 research articles published in four top conservation-focused journals.

The study shows that historical biases in conservation biology research remain entrenched. Despite increasing numbers of conservation articles published each decade from 1980 to 2020, research effort has increasingly focused on the same suite of taxa. Surprisingly, some of the most studied species in these conservation articles had low conservation risk, including several domesticated animals. Animals and terrestrial ecosystems are consistently over-represented while plants, fungi, and freshwater ecosystems remain under-represented. Strategically funding investigations of understudied species and ecosystems will ensure more effective conservation effort across multiple levels of biodiversity, alleviate impediments to biodiversity targets, and ultimately prevent further extinctions.