Location biases in ecological research on Australian terrestrial reptiles (2020) Piccolo et al., Scientific Reports, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-66719-x

The Crux

Constant improvements in data integration technology have meant that its now possible to bring together large numbers of separate datasets into enormous datasets spanning many species and regions. This sounds great in practice – that means we can look at important trends at large scales with plenty of data, right?

The problem is that there are often biases within these data. Some areas are more accessible and will have higher densities of observations or studies. Some species are of less interest and may be more poorly covered. Today’s researchers wanted to take such a dataset and see if they could identify patterns in the biases present.

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