Species discovery and dental ecometrics: good news, bad news and recommendations for the future

Datasets for Wilson et al 2022: Species discovery and dental ecometrics: good news, bad news and recommendations for the future which estimates the number of large mammalian herbivores that remain undescribed and tests the hypothesis that the incompleteness of the modern record should have an effect on community descriptors, with dental ecometrics used as an example. We found that there remain at least 84 undescribed large mammal species, and that these species are not evenly distributed, with the largest remaining diversity to be found within primates, artiodactyls and marsupials, especially those living in the Neotropic and Afrotropic realms. We found that until about 40% completeness, the number of species described has a big impact on both trait averages and estimates of climate, but beyond this point, climate estimates are stable to futher descriptions.

本数据集关联Wilson等（2022）的研究《物种发现与牙齿生态计量学：利好、挑战与未来展望》，该研究旨在估算尚未被正式描述的大型植食性哺乳动物类群数量，并检验“现代记录的不完整性会对群落描述指标产生影响”这一假说，研究以牙齿生态计量学（dental ecometrics）作为分析范例。
研究发现，目前仍有至少84种大型哺乳动物尚未被正式描述，且此类未描述物种的分布并不均匀：物种多样性剩余缺口最大的类群集中于灵长目、偶蹄目与有袋类，尤其是栖息于新热带界与非洲热带界的类群。
此外研究表明，在记录完整度达到约40%之前，已描述物种数量会对性状平均值与气候估算结果均产生显著影响；而当完整度超过该阈值后，气候估算结果将不再受后续新增物种描述的干扰。