GBIF falls short of providing a representative picture of the global distribution of insects

Abstract

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is the largest databank on primary biodiversity data. We examined the completeness and geographical biases for all insect data on GBIF to determine its representativeness. Our results demonstrate that GBIF is far from providing a reliable representation about the global distribution of insects. Despite the growing number of records during the last years, few spatial units are well‐surveyed. At coarse resolutions, 34% of the world terrestrial cells lack data and barely 0.5% have completeness values above 90%. Insects are crucial in many ecological functions, and their alarming decline makes it more pressing to have a representative sample to improve our predictive capacity. However, the dynamic nature of species distributions and the strength of anthropogenic forces call for immediate conservation decisions that cannot wait for the empirical data on the identity and distribution of insects.