In a recent paper led by Fernanda Alves-Martins, we have explored how data quality and completeness affects our ability to assess the determinants of the species richness of odonates (dragonflies and damselflies). We created a large consortium of experts in Neotropical Odonata, who provided their data to create the first realm-wide database on this group. They also helped curating the database, to ensure that it fits the highest standards of taxonomic homogenization. Then we identified reliable inventories at different levels of inventory completeness, and trained models of biodiversity-climate relationships, conducting also a sensitivity analysis. Indeed, we find some variations in variable coefficients in the climate-diversity models (that is, in the observed relationship betweeen different aspects of climate and species richness) depending on how stringent we were about the quality and level of completeness of the inventories used to train the models. But despite these variations, our results confirm that temperature, precipitation and potential evapotranspiration are consistently good predictors of Odonata species richness across the whole Neotropical realm. This stresses that we do need to assess the potential impacts of data quality in our biodiversity models, but also that we may have enough data to confirm some of the well-known relationships between biodiversity and climate at the large scale.

You can read the article at https://jhortal.com/project/alves-martins-et-al-j-biogeogr-2024-sampling-completeness-changes-perceptions-climate-species-richness-relationships/