Biodiversity data collection is growing exponentially. The increase is driven in part by international commitments to conservation, market investments and technological advances, and the growing urgency of human impacts including climate change. Nations increasingly rely on biodiversity data in order to strategically meet global conservation targets for the coming decades. But not all data is collected equally.
Millie Chapman, a postdoctoral scholar at the UC Santa Barbara-based National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), studies the social and political context of biodiversity data collection. In a recent Science publication, Chapman and her colleagues demonstrate that biodiversity data is increasingly concentrated in wealthy countries.