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Biodiversity inventories. Basic inventorying of biodiversity is far from complete in the Americas. Accumulated species descriptions for vascular plants have not yet reached an asymptote. Over the period 2004-2016, Brazil registered the largest number of new plant species names in the International Plant Names Index worldwide. Over 2,000 new species of plants and vertebrates have been described from the Amazon alone since 1999 (Charity et al., 2016). Even in well-known groups such as mammals, 42% of the new species described worldwide between 1993 to 2008 came from the Americas (Ceballos & Ehrlich, 2009), mostly from Mesoamerica and South America. These trends are likely to be repeated for other taxonomic groups. Knowledge of invertebrates is particularly deficient including for taxonomic groups of particular importance for human well-being, such as bees. This assessment has shown that high-quality information on species richness across the entire Americas is available for a very limited number of taxonomic groups. Some estimates of biodiversity, of course, might be exaggerated if care was not taken to remove synonyms. Overall, an accurate estimate of the total biodiversity in the Americas is currently not possible, and is unlikely to become available for a long time at the current rate of progress. Also, systematized knowledge on the use of biodiversity is still scarce, despite major efforts made in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Colombia. Similar and probably even much larger knowledge gaps occur in the marine (and probably freshwater) realms. Based on their studies, it is predicted that only about half of marine organisms have been described for the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America (Miloslavich et al., 2011); as on the land, a severe lack of taxonomic expertise in the subregion is a major handicap.
Mobility of biodiversity data. Progress in the detection of the impacts of climate change on biodiversity, conservation gaps, and areas with high concentrations of invasive species today depends heavily on georeferenced biodiversity occurrence data. Overall, 50% of georeferenced online occurrence data in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility pertains to the Americas. However, the density of georeferenced data varies widely among subregions (and between countries within each subregion – not shown). Causes include differences in intrinsic richness among countries, a greater level of collaboration between foreign institutions and the tropical countries, differences in exploration intensity, lack of manpower to digitalize biodiversity data and some reticence still on the part of some institutions to incorporate their biodiversity data into the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The South American subregion lags behind, but important efforts are getting underway. For example, specimens from several institutions in Argentina, thanks to support by the Argentinian National Science Council, can now be found in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Brazil is creating the Brazilian Information System on Biodiversity and the “Portal da Biodiversidade” which are first steps to consolidate biodiversity data and make it available online. The Chilean national science council is contemplating making it compulsory for grant-holders to place biodiversity data collected with national research funds in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.
Importantly, efforts are being made to build comprehensive alien species databases at the country (e.g. USA, Brazil, Mexico, Chile) and regional (e.g. Invasives Information Network) levels. Not having access to all biodiversity data, in addition to hindering research progress, introduces uncertainty in the results of regional and global-scale studies that rely heavily on occurrence data and lowers the quality of environmental impact studies within countries.
Biome and ecosystem-level data. With very few exceptions, we currently lack accurate knowledge of biodiversity at the biome level. Where available, the information is limited to a few groups of better-known organisms and does not necessarily coincide with the spatial delineation of the World Wildlife Fund terrestrial biomes adopted by the assessment (see Chapter 1). These have been major obstacles in this assessment. Overall, studies, when present, are insufficient in number for performing biome-level meta-analyses. Thus the assessments of the units analysis in Chapter 3 are necessarily descriptive and piecemeal. Revision of the World Wildlife Fund biomes based on a consensus is highly desirable now that more accurate vegetation mapping is possible and can be combined with verified species distribution data. If all countries were to adopt such a system, this would be an enormous step forward. One reason for a lack of biome-level data is that many biomes in the Americas cross country boundaries. For example, high elevation systems in South American are found in seven countries and span about 44 degrees of latitude, Mesoamerican dry tropical forest stretches over seven countries and the Amazonian basin over eight. This transnational problem is far less acute in the North American subregion composed of only three countries. Because governments are usually first concerned with the biodiversity of their respective countries, resources for undertaking cross-country, biome-level surveys are generally lacking, but of course, this is not the only reason. This represents a serious challenge for future regional and global IPBES assessments and undermines the efficiency of conservation measures in biomes.
Data on population sizes and genetic diversity is scarce outside the North American subregion. Likewise, long-term series data are few and far between making it difficult to detect temporal trends. Throughout the Americas, fishes and invertebrates differ in their population status, yet the exploitation status of many species is unknown across several taxonomic groups, in particular, elasmobranchs (sharks, skates and rays) and coastal fishes because of a lack of long-term series data. For terrestrial habitats, in the early 1990s, pioneering efforts in the US Long-Term Ecological Research Network led to the International Long Term Ecological Research Network (Vanderbilt & Gaiser, 2017). Although many formally accredited sites are found in the Americas, these are strongly concentrated in the USA, Mexico, and Brazil. There are no high altitude International Long Term Ecological Research sites along the entire length of the high Andes where global warming is occurring faster than in adjacent lowlands. Nevertheless, the GLORIA program (www.mountainstudies.org/climate-change) has been active in setting up monitoring sites in the northern and central Andes, to be extended now to the southern Andes. For the marine domain, two North American marine sites were recently accredited by International Long Term Ecological Research Network.
Biodiversity-ecosystem functions-NCP linkages. Most work in this area in the Americas comes from the North American subregion and has involved plot-based studies with a strong focus on productivity. Some information exists in the agricultural, fisheries, pollination, and hydrological domains in the other subregions. Across the Americas, vascular plants comprise the only taxonomic group for which the coverage of functional trait data is abundant (Kattge et al., 2011), yet gaps in functional trait data are highest precisely where diversity tends to be highest: i.e., tropical latitudes (Jetz et al., 2016). Studies linking biodiversity and other less tangible kinds of NCP are incipient throughout. The health benefits of biodiversity and level of equity in terms of access to green areas in urban areas, for example, are fairly open fields. A major gap in our understanding, perhaps with the exception of carbon storage, are links between biodiversity and ecosystem services or NCP at large spatial scales. This requires replicated information across individual biomes/units of analysis and hence coordinated research, often in several countries. To advance in our knowledge here, also, greater collaboration between the traditional biodiversity research community and other disciplines is desirable. Two major challenges for the future in the Americas are to standardize information and to make it available in a template that is usable by decision makers. In this sense, initiatives such as the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership (https://www.bipindicators.net/), which make suites of global indicators available to support national-level reporting and/or National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans updating and implementation, are promising.