Fig 1.
Sankey diagram quantifying research flows from the region of author affiliation to the region of research conductance.
Vertical bars: GDP, the number of threatened species, the number of ecoregions and protected land surface area in each region (relative values; n = 49,932).
Table 1.
Correlations of GDP, number of threatened species, number of ecoregions and total size of protected areas (each for all 8 regions) with the number of publications for each continental region based on authors’ affiliation and on study site.
Significant correlations are highlighted in bold.
Table 2.
Contributions to publications (in %) at the level of ecological organization, research domain, and taxonomic/functional group by continental region according to (A) author affiliations and (B) study sites.
Percentages add up to more than 100% due to publications that cover more than one given level of ecological organization, research domain, or taxonomic group.
Fig 2.
Cartograms showing ratios between biodiversity-related research effort and biodiversity quantifiers.
In (A) the size of each country represents the number of threatened species (based on the IUCN Red List); the color represents the ratio between publication count and number of threatened species. In (B) the size of each country represents the number of ecoregions (based on the WWF List of Ecoregions); the color represents the ratio between publication count and number of ecoregions. In both (A) and (B), red countries have fewer studies per threatened species or per ecoregion and thus exhibit a relative biodiversity research deficit. The cartograms were generated using QGIS version 2.12.0 [20].
Fig 3.
Core scientists in biodiversity research.
(A) Global distribution of identified core scientists in biodiversity research, with PhD (green) and current (red) affiliation. The size of a circle represents the number of core scientists. The lines represent the movement of each individual scientist from the PhD location to the current affiliation. The map focuses on North America and Europe, as 142 out of 156 core scientists in biodiversity research (91%) were affiliated to institutions in these two continents. The map was generated using QGIS version 2.12.0 [20]. (B) Core scientists’ network during different time periods. Colors represent modularity clusters. Node size represents degree (centrality), i.e. how many publications one core scientist published with other core scientists. The network was generated using Gephi version 0.8.2 [22].
Table 3.
Network statistics describing the collaboration among identified core scientists working on biodiversity during different time periods.