Back

What unexplored means: Mapping undersampled regions in natural history collections

Chakrabarty, P.; Ball, L.; Bedoya, A.; Rodriguez Machado, S.; Paredes-Burneo, D.; Rutledge, S.; Boyd, D.; Vander Pluym, D.; Babb-Biernacki, S.; Chipps, A.; Ozturk, R.; Terzi, Y.

2024-02-12 ecology
10.1101/2024.02.09.579602 bioRxiv
Show abstract

We examined global records of accessible natural history voucher collections (with publicly available data) for terrestrial and freshwater vascular plants, fungi, freshwater fishes, birds, mammals, and herpetofauna (amphibians and reptiles) and highlight areas of the world that would be considered undersampled and sometimes called "unexplored" (i.e., have relatively low, or no evidence of, past sampling efforts) under typical Western-scientific descriptions. We also question what "unexplored" may actually mean in these contexts and explain how retiring the term in favor of more nuanced phrasing can mitigate future misunderstandings of natural history science.

Matching journals

The top 1 journal accounts for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.