'data deficient' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to describe something for which there is not enough data to decide whether it is true or not. For example, "The research was data deficient, so we could not draw any conclusions".
And the one that's not – the flatback turtle – is listed as data deficient, which means scientists simply don't know how it's doing.
Official sources describe the night parrot as "data deficient" – the closest that dry taxonomic lists come to capturing what birders, scientists and even poets have described as one of the most elusive, enigmatic and mysterious birds in the world.
The Sichuan taimen is listed as critically endangered, the Hucho taimen or Mongolian (or Siberian) taimen is listed as vulnerable, and the Korean taimen is listed as "data deficient"; all three do not share data-deficient status.
Efficient use of survey budgets will ultimately contribute to the conservation of threatened and data deficient mammals.
In many instances only weed occurrence has been documented, creating a data deficient environment for management decision making.
Perhaps a third of all land plants are at risk of extinction, including many that are undescribed, or are described but otherwise data deficient.
The Himalayan region is severely data-deficient in terms of observations of climate change impacts on ecosystem and biodiversity (IPCC 2007).
This chapter supplements knowledge gaps in data-deficient areas by extrapolating recently published peer-reviewed tiger density estimates for those subspecies in known remaining tiger habitat.
Meanwhile, data-deficient amphibian species should receive a higher priority than they usually receive in conservation planning, as a precautionary measure.
This includes The Weather Channel, which is using the technology to create on-demand mesh networks in data-deficient areas to spread urgent weather warnings; Hotstar is working on offline media sharing for those times connectivity isn't available, like on airplanes or subways; and GameInsight will use the API to find nearby players and to run entire games offline.
This process has already begun under a new WWF-REDD+ project (which focusses on better sampling the data-deficient land cover categories identified in this study [55]) and the National Forest Monitoring and Assessment (NAFORMA) project [56, 57].
