The study, carried out by the University of Sussex, the Natural History Museum and the UN Environment Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre, analysed biodiversity samples taken from 1,939 sites inside and 4,592 sites outside protected areas.
Co-inertia analyses compared hedge characteristics with the animal biodiversity sampled.
To complete the species list, I would organize extensive biodiversity sampling in yet-unexplored or difficult-to-reach areas and in environments that require expensive specialized equipment.
In an ideal world, we would have direct assessments of the viability of all species in biodiversity samples, and could use this to inform our estimates of conservation value of different land-uses.
Relatively new technologies, like swath bathymetry, are providing the ability to rapidly map and visualize the bottom in deeper waters, and this is essential for targeting subsequent biodiversity sampling.
For example, some of the individuals recorded in biodiversity samples could represent transient or sink populations and spill-over effects could mean that occasional species are recorded in modified land-uses even though they are unable to sustain viable populations in the long-term when isolated from source populations in primary habitat.
Each year as a part of the Ocean Survey 20/20 program (administered by Land Information New Zealand), about 60 vessel days of the NIWA Research Vessel Tangaroa are funded for baseline seabed bathymetry, habitat mapping, and biodiversity sampling in a number of areas in the New Zealand EEZ and Ross Sea/Southern Ocean.
Finally, and perhaps most urgent, treating biodiversity samples as disposable ignores opportunities to assemble archives of diagnostic samples for future studies.
Biodiversity samples, in contrast, are often identified cursorily or incompletely, and the documentation (i.e., the host or vector animal from which the pathogens were isolated) is discarded.
We recommend the following guidelines for designing non-expert biodiversity sampling programs that can use DNA barcoding for identification of samples: (a) Sampling strategies must include various macro and microhabitats.
