Representation of global change drivers across biodiversity datasets

Global change has altered biodiversity and impacted ecosystem functions and services around the planet. Understanding the effects of anthropogenic drivers like human use and climate change on biodiversity change has become a key challenge for science and policy. However, our knowledge of biodiversity change is limited by the available data and their biases. Over land and sea, we test the representation of three worldwide and multi-taxa biodiversity databases (Living Planet, BioTIME and PREDICTS) across spatial and temporal variation in global change and across the tree of life. We find that variation in global change drivers is better captured over space than over time around the world and across the previous 150 years. Spatial representation of global change was as high as 78% in the marine realm and 31% on land. Our findings suggest ways to improve the use of existing biodiversity data and better target future ecological monitoring.