Understanding bias in geographic range size estimates

Global Ecology and Biogeography

Volumn 21, Issue 7, 2012, Pages 732-742

  Sheth, Seema N ^a   Lohmann, Lúcia G ^a,b   Distler, Trisha ^a,c   Jiménez, Iván ^a  

^a MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF SÃO PAULO   (Brazil)

^c Audubon California   (United States)

Author keywords

Area of occupancy; Bias; Collection effort; Geographic range size; Herbarium data; Sampling intensity

Indexed keywords

COMPUTER SIMULATION; ESTIMATION METHOD; INTERSPECIFIC VARIATION; MUSEUM; RANGE SIZE;

ARGENTINA; UNITED STATES;

BIGNONIACEAE;

EID: 84862325044     PISSN: 1466822X     EISSN: 14668238     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1466-8238.2011.00716.x     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Adler, F.R. (1998) Modeling the dynamics of life, calculus and probability for life scientists. Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, Pacific Grove, CA.
2. Brown, J.H. (1984) On the relationship between the abundance and distribution of species. The American Naturalist, 124, 255-279.
3. Coates Palgrave, K. (1983) Trees of southern Africa, 3rd updated impression. C. Struik, Cape Town.
4. Cochran, W.G. (1977) Sampling techniques, 3rd edn John Wiley and Sons, New York.
5. Douillet, P.L. (2009) Sampling distribution of the variance. Proceedings of the 2009 Winter Simulation Conference (ed. by M.D. Rosetti, R.R. Hill, B. Johansson, A. Dunkin and R.G. Ingalls ), pp. 403-414. Available at: (accessed 30 December 2009).
6. Elith, J., Graham, C.H., Anderson, R.P. etal. (2006) Novel methods improve prediction of species' distributions from occurrence data. Ecography, 29, 129-151.
7. Funk, V.A. & Richardson, K.S. (2002) Systematic data in biodiversity studies: use it or lose it. Systematic Biology, 51, 303-316.
8. Gaston, K.J. (1994) Measuring geographic range sizes. Ecography, 17, 198-205.
9. Gaston, K.J. (2003) The structure and dynamics of geographic ranges. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
10. Gaston, K.J., Blackburn, T.M., Greenwood, J.J.D., Gregory, R.D., Quinn, R.M. & Lawton, J.H. (2000) Abundance-occupancy relationships. Journal of Applied Ecology, 37, 39-59.
11. Gaston, K.J., Quinn, R.M., Wood, S. & Arnold, H.R. (1996) Measures of geographic range size: the effects of sample size. Ecography, 19, 259-268.
12. Gentry, A.H. (1986) Endemism in tropical vs. temperate plant communities. Conservation biology (ed. by M. Soulé ), pp. 153-181. Sinauer Press, Sunderland, MA.
13. Gibbons, D.W., Reid, J.B. & Chapman, R.A. (1993) The new atlas of breeding birds in Britain and Ireland: 1988-1991. Poyser, London.
14. Hijmans, R.J. & van Etten, J. (2010) Package 'raster': geographic analysis and modeling with raster data. Available at: (accessed 26 August 2010).
15. Hijmans, R.J., Garrett, K.A., Huamán, Z., Zhang, D.P., Schreuder, M. & Bonierbale, M. (2000) Assessing the geographic representativeness of Genebank collections: the case of Bolivian wild potatoes. Conservation Biology, 14, 1755-1765.
16. Hijmans, R.J., Cameron, S.E., Parra, J.L., Jones, P.G. & Jarvis, A. (2005) Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. International Journal of Climatology, 25, 1965-1978.
17. IUCN Standards and Petitions Working Group (2010) Guidelines for using the IUCN Red List categories and criteria. Version 8.1. IUCN SSC Biodiversity Assessments Sub-Committee, Gland, Switzerland. Available at: (accessed 31 December 2009).
18. Jalas, J. & Suominen, J. (eds) (1972) Atlas florae Europaeae: distribution of vascular plants in Europe, 1. Pteridophyta (Psilotaceae to Azollaceae). The Committee for Mapping the Flora of Europe and Societas Biologica Fennica Vanamo, Helsinki.
19. Kadmon, R., Farber, O. & Danin, A. (2003) A systematic analysis of factors affecting the performance of climatic envelope models. Ecological Applications, 13, 853-867.
20. Kadmon, R., Farber, O. & Danin, A. (2004) Effect of roadside bias on the accuracy of predictive maps produced by bioclimatic models. Ecological Applications, 14, 401-413.
21. Kvist, L.P., Skog, L.E., Clark, J.L. & Dunn, R.W. (2004) The family Gesneriaceae as example of biological extinction in western Ecuador. Lyonia, 6, 127-151. Available at: (accessed 30 December 2009).
22. Lohmann, L.G. (2003) Phylogeny, classification, morphological diversification and biogeography of Bignonieae (Bignoniaceae, Lamiales). PhD Thesis, University of Missouri-St Louis, St Louis, MO.
23. Lohmann, L.G. (in press) A new generic classification of Bignonieae (Bignoniaceae) based on molecular phylogenetic data and morphological synapomorphies. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden.
24. Loiselle, B.A., Jørgensen, P.M., Consiglio, T., Jiménez, I., Blake, J.G., Lohmann, L.G. & Montiel, O.M. (2008) Predicting species distributions from herbarium collections: does climate bias in collection sampling influence model outcomes? Journal of Biogeography, 35, 105-116.
25. Lomolino, M.V. (2004) Conservation biogeography. Frontiers of biogeography: new directions in the geography of nature (ed. by M.V. Lomolino and L.R. Heaney ), pp. 293-296. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA.
26. MacKenzie, D.I., Nichols, J.D., Royle, A.J., Pollock, K.H., Bailey, L.L. & Hines, J.E. (2006) Occupancy estimation and modeling: inferring patterns and dynamics of species occurrence. Elsevier, Burlington, VT.
27. Margules, C.R. & Pressey, R.L. (2000) Systematic conservation planning. Nature, 405, 243-253.
28. Missouri Botanical Garden (2006) Tropicos. Available at: (accessed 15 November 2006).
29. Panik, M.J. (2005) Advanced statistics from an elementary point of view. Elsevier, Amsterdam.
30. Parnell, J.A.N., Simpson, D.A., Moat, J., Kirkup, D.W., Chantaranothai, P., Boyce, P.C., Bygrave, P., Dransfield, S., Jebb, M.H.P., Macklin, J., Meade, C., Middleton, D.J., Muasya, A.M., Prajaksood, A., Pendry, C.A., Pooma, R., Suddee, S. & Wilkin, P. (2003) Plant collecting spread and densities: their potential impact on biogeographical studies in Thailand. Journal of Biogeography, 30, 193-209.
31. Phillips, S.J., Anderson, R.P. & Schapire, R.E. (2006) Maximum entropy modeling of species geographic distributions. Ecological Modelling, 190, 231-259.
32. Pitman, J. (1993) Probability. Springer-Verlag, New York.
33. R Development Core Team (2010) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. versions 2.11.1 and 2.12.0. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna.
34. Rahbek, C., Gotelli, N.J., Colwell, R.K., Entsminger, G.L., Rangel, T.F.L.V.B. & Graves, G.R. (2007) Predicting continental-scale patterns of bird species richness with spatially explicit models. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 274, 165-174.
35. Reddy, S. & Dávalos, L.M. (2003) Geographical sampling bias and its implications for conservation priorities in Africa. Journal of Biogeography, 30, 1719-1727.
36. Rondinini, C., Wilson, K.A., Biotani, L., Grantham, H. & Possingham, H.P. (2006) Tradeoffs of different types of species occurrence data for use in systematic conservation planning. Ecology Letters, 9, 1136-1145.
37. Russell, M.P. & Lindberg, D.R. (1988) Real and random patterns associated with molluscan spatial and temporal distributions. Paleobiology, 14, 322-330.
38. Sharrock, J.T.R. (1976) The atlas of breeding birds of Britain and Ireland. Poyser, Berkhamsted.
39. Sheth, S.N., Lohmann, L.G., Consiglio, T. & Jiménez, I. (2008) Effects of detectability on estimates of geographic range size in Bignonieae. Conservation Biology, 22, 200-211.
40. Valencia, R., Pitman, N., León-Yánez, S. & Jørgensen, P.M. (2000) Libro rojo de las plantas endémicas del Ecuador. Herbario QCA, Pontifica Universidad Católica del Ecuador, Quito.
41. White, G.C. & Bennetts, R.E. (1996) Analysis of count data using the negative binomial distribution. Ecology, 77, 2549-2557.
42. Wright, D.H. (1991) Correlations between incidence and abundance are expected by chance. Journal of Biogeography, 18, 463-466.
43. Zar, J.H. (1999) Biostatistical analysis, 4th edn. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.