The research, led by Pietro Pollo and Michael Kasumovic of the University of New South Wales, represents the most comprehensive assessment of taxonomic bias ever conducted in the field. Previous studies relied on small samples of journals and manual classification of papers, leaving open the question of whether the patterns documented in the early 2000s had persisted. To overcome these limitations, the team analyzed 1,383,803 papers from 612 journals, spanning literature published as far back as 1877, and tracked how the representation of different animal groups changed between 2001 and 2025.

Classifying papers by hand at this scale would have been impossible, so the researchers built a keyword-based algorithm trained on nearly 5,000 manually classified papers. The algorithm drew on the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy and a customized vocabulary of taxonomic terms to identify the animal focus of each paper from its title, abstract, and keywords. When tested against 1,815 papers the researchers had classified independently, the algorithm achieved at least 97.2 percent accuracy for every animal group, with an F1-score of 91.2 percent. The team also verified that the algorithm rarely produced impossible labels, such as identifying a paper in a mammalogy journal as being about something other than mammals.

The scale of the bias is striking. Of the 991,894 papers involving animals, 46.1 percent focused exclusively on invertebrates and 45.1 percent exclusively on vertebrates, figures that appear roughly balanced until one considers that invertebrates account for approximately 95 percent of animal species. When the researchers compared the observed proportion of papers on each group with what would be expected if research effort were distributed in proportion to species richness, insects emerged as the most underrepresented group relative to their diversity, while mammals and fish were the most overrepresented.

The study also documented how bias is embedded in the structure of the field itself. Nearly 40 percent of the 612 journals analyzed had explicit taxonomic restrictions, and a striking 42 percent of these specialized journals focused on arthropods. The researchers found that species-rich invertebrate groups such as insects and arachnids are often relegated to these specialized outlets, which likely reach narrower audiences than general ecology and evolution journals. This means the true extent of vertebrate favoritism may be even more pronounced from the perspective of an average researcher scanning the broader literature.

Perhaps most disappointingly, the overall pattern has shown no improvement since taxonomic bias was first formally discussed in 2002. The proportion of papers on vertebrates across the literature as a whole remained stable over the 25-year study period, and in some subfields it actually increased. In aquatic journals, for example, fish rose from 35.8 percent of papers in 2001 to 49.7 percent in 2025. In behaviour, conservation, and general ecology and evolution journals, mammals and birds remained particularly dominant. The only subfield where invertebrate research increased was zoology journals, likely because these outlets publish much of the work describing new species, the vast majority of which are invertebrates.

The researchers also examined whether journal prestige metrics were linked to taxonomic focus. Papers published between 2021 and 2025 in journals with higher impact factors and citation indicators were more likely to focus on vertebrates, although the relationship was not uniform across subfields. Interestingly, birds were equally likely to appear in high-impact and lower-impact journals, suggesting that the prestige advantage accrues to vertebrates as a broad category rather than to any single charismatic group.

The attention gap proved even more consequential than the publication gap. Compared with papers on invertebrates in the same journal, papers on vertebrates received on average 10.2 percent more citations, 43.1 percent more mentions in online documents such as news outlets and social media, 24.2 percent more readers on the reference manager Mendeley, and 45.1 percent higher Altmetric scores, a weighted measure of overall online attention. These findings align with previous research showing that vertebrates attract more attention on platforms like Instagram and Wikipedia, and even on government-curated imagery such as postage stamps. Within the attention metrics, birds often attracted the greatest online buzz but received the fewest citations, revealing that public appeal and academic influence do not always coincide.

The authors caution that their within-journal attention analyses are correlational and cannot fully rule out confounding factors such as paper topic. Still, they argue that the patterns likely reflect deeper societal biases, since surveys consistently show that people value vertebrates more than invertebrates, a perception that editors, reviewers, and funding committees may unconsciously apply when judging research appeal. The consequences extend beyond academic vanity: taxonomic bias can stifle medical and engineering innovation by limiting biomimetic inspiration from understudied organisms, and it undermines the theoretical generality that ecology and evolution depend upon.

To break the cycle, the researchers propose concrete interventions within academia. They urge journals and funding bodies to systematically collect and publicly report the taxa studied in submitted manuscripts and funded projects, to incorporate taxonomic diversity into guidelines for awards, hiring, and publication decisions, and to establish targeted financial and publishing incentives for research on neglected organisms. They also emphasize the need to revive descriptive disciplines such as taxonomy and natural history, since hypotheses cannot be tested about organisms that have never been described. While such measures may seem ambitious, the authors note that similar skepticism once greeted diversity initiatives that are now widely accepted, and they hope their findings will prompt institutions to extend their commitments to equity to the tree of life itself.

Subject of Research: Taxonomic bias in ecology and evolution research literature

Article Title: Taxonomic Bias Persists in Ecology and Evolution Research Despite Decades of Concern

Article References: Pollo, P., & Kasumovic, M. M. (2026). Taxonomic Bias Persists in Ecology and Evolution Research Despite Decades of Concern. Ecology and Evolution, 16(10), Article e74450. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74450

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74450

Keywords: taxonomic bias, ecology, evolutionary biology, vertebrates, invertebrates, journal impact factor, Altmetric, biodiversity, conservation, entomology, scientific publishing, citation bias

The scale of the survey is one of its distinguishing features. The researchers collected 1,387 invertebrate specimens spanning nine major groups: soil nematodes, earthworms, leeches, snails, slugs, ticks, woodlice, millipedes, and insects. Each specimen was screened for Blastocystis using molecular methods that target the organism’s small subunit ribosomal RNA gene, the standard barcode for identifying this parasite and assigning it to one of its recognized subtypes. Morphological observation complemented the genetic work, allowing the team to look for the characteristic vacuolated and granular forms that Blastocystis can adopt under the microscope.

The results were strikingly uneven across the invertebrate tree. Insects stood out as the group in which Blastocystis DNA was most frequently detected, while the other invertebrate categories yielded almost nothing. Only a single tick tested positive, and no Blastocystis DNA was found in soil nematodes, earthworms, leeches, snails, slugs, woodlice, or millipedes. This pattern immediately raises the question of what makes insects different, and the authors suggest that the answer may lie in the ecology of the insects themselves: their living space, their habitat environment, and their feeding modes appear to be associated with whether the parasite’s genetic material shows up in them.

Within the insects, the detection rates varied considerably by order. Neuroptera, the lacewings and their relatives, showed the highest rate at 25 percent, a figure that demands attention even if the number of lacewing specimens screened was comparatively small. Hemiptera, the true bugs, followed at 5.66 percent, then Orthoptera, the grasshoppers and crickets, at 4.76 percent, Diptera, the flies, at 4.73 percent, Hymenoptera, the bees, wasps, and ants, at 2.75 percent, and Coleoptera, the beetles, at 2.63 percent. These are modest percentages for most groups, but the breadth of positive orders is what matters: Blastocystis DNA was recovered from six different insect orders, considerably expanding the known range of arthropod taxa in which the organism has been detected.

Subtype analysis added a second layer of insight. Blastocystis is conventionally divided into genetically distinct subtypes, known as STs, and only three of them, ST1, ST2, and ST3, were found in the surveyed insects. These are the same subtypes that dominate in humans and many other mammals, which makes their appearance in insects particularly intriguing. The three subtypes were isolated from bumblebees, lacewings, and houseflies, respectively, and the isolates obtained from these insects supported the molecular identification results, providing a morphological and culture-based confirmation that the DNA detections were not artifacts of the screening process.

The genetic diversity within the subtypes proved to be another important finding. When the team performed haplotype analysis and genetic distance calculations separately for each subtype, they found substantial intra-subtype genetic diversity for ST1. In practical terms, this means that the ST1 sequences recovered from insects were not all identical copies of a single strain; instead, they represented multiple genetic variants within the subtype. Such diversity could reflect multiple independent acquisition events, ongoing genetic variation within insect-associated populations, or a complex web of transmission between insects, vertebrates, and the environment. Distinguishing among these possibilities will require further sampling and more fine-grained genetic comparison.

To understand why this matters, it helps to recall what is known about Blastocystis. The organism is an anaerobic stramenopile, a member of a broad eukaryotic lineage rather than a true parasite in the classical sense, and it colonizes the intestinal tracts of a remarkable range of hosts. Its prevalence in human populations can be high, particularly in regions with close contact between people, livestock, and wildlife. Transmission is thought to occur through the fecal-oral route, via contaminated food and water, and the organism’s resistant cyst-like forms are believed to survive in the environment. Yet the details of how Blastocystis moves between hosts and persists outside the gut have been difficult to pin down, precisely because so little is known about which organisms besides vertebrates might carry it.

This is where the new survey fills a genuine gap. As the authors note, reports on the occurrence of Blastocystis in invertebrate taxa and its interactions with invertebrates have been limited, and this scarcity has greatly hindered the ecological characterization of the organism. By screening such a broad and systematic collection of invertebrates, the study provides the first large-scale picture of where Blastocystis DNA appears outside the vertebrate gut in this region. The finding that insects, and only insects among the surveyed groups, were repeatedly positive suggests that arthropods deserve a place in any model of Blastocystis transmission, whether as biological hosts, mechanical carriers, or environmental reservoirs.

The authors are careful about interpretation. Detecting DNA in an insect does not by itself prove that Blastocystis reproduces inside the insect or that the insect is a true host; the genetic material could reflect recent feeding on contaminated material, passage through the gut, or association with the insect’s surface or food stores. Nevertheless, the pattern of detections across insect orders with different diets and habitats, together with the successful isolation of the organism from bumblebees, lacewings, and houseflies, supports the possibility that insects may participate in the environmental transmission cycle of the parasite. Houseflies, for example, move freely between fecal matter and human food, and bumblebees and lacewings occupy ecological niches that bring them into contact with flowers, foliage, and soil-associated microorganisms.

The broader implication is a reframing of Blastocystis ecology. If insects routinely acquire and carry the organism, they could serve as vectors that shuttle subtypes between vertebrate hosts and environmental reservoirs, or as sentinel organisms whose screening reveals the presence of Blastocystis in a given habitat. The concentration of detections in insects with particular lifestyles, and the near absence of detections in soil and aquatic invertebrates, hints that specific ecological pathways, perhaps involving feeding on vertebrate feces, plant material, or other contaminated substrates, govern which insects encounter the parasite. Untangling those pathways is the obvious next step, and the authors argue that their findings contribute to a better understanding of the ecological niche of Blastocystis. For a microorganism that colonizes billions of people and countless animals, the discovery that the six-legged world may be part of its story is a reminder that even the most familiar gut microbes can hold ecological surprises when researchers look beyond their usual hosts.

Subject of Research: Molecular detection and subtype diversity of the intestinal protist Blastocystis sp. in insects and other invertebrates in China

Article Title: Molecular Detection of Blastocystis sp. in Insects and Other Invertebrates From China: Subtype Diversity and Potential Ecological Implications

Article References: Nan, H., Wang, N., Zhang, S., Yang, X., Li, H., Zhang, X., Wu, R., Wang, H., Yang, X., & Ma, L. (2026). Molecular Detection of Blastocystis sp. in Insects and Other Invertebrates From China: Subtype Diversity and Potential Ecological Implications. Microbial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-026-02894-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00248-026-02894-0

Keywords: Blastocystis, insects, invertebrates, parasitology, molecular detection, subtypes, genetic diversity, Neuroptera, ecology, transmission, China, Microbial Ecology

The study period was anything but ordinary. Portugal endured an unusually dry stretch in which every month except March recorded below-average precipitation, and the Portuguese Institute for the Ocean and Atmosphere logged six distinct heat waves between September 2021 and September 2022. Following World Meteorological Organisation guidelines, the researchers classified heat waves as periods lasting at least two consecutive days with maximum temperatures five degrees Celsius above the mean. The events they documented ranged from six to sixteen days in duration, and remarkably, one occurred in December 2021, demonstrating that extreme heat no longer respects seasonal boundaries. This relentless sequence of thermal shocks, layered on top of chronic drought, created a natural experiment that the team could exploit by sampling monthly across a full year.

The Minho River estuary, which forms roughly forty kilometres of the border between Portugal and Spain, is a mesotidal, partially mixed system that tends toward a salt wedge during high flows. The researchers selected two dominant submerged plants anchored at opposite ends of the salinity gradient. Fucus ceranoides, a brown alga typical of sheltered rocky estuaries from northern Portugal to Norway, grows on rocks near the river mouth in the polyhaline zone. Egeria densa, a submerged macrophyte native to subtropical South America that first appeared in the international section of the Minho in the early 1990s, forms dense monospecific mats along the upper estuary’s tidal freshwater zone. Because Egeria densa’s downstream distribution stops at the oligohaline-limnetic boundary, roughly sixteen kilometres from the mouth, saline intrusion during dry months poses a constant threat to its foothold.

Monthly sampling from September 2021 to September 2022 was conducted at low tide, with five replicate quadrats of 0.1 square metres collected by hand for each plant. In the laboratory, the team removed, sorted and counted every associated invertebrate to the lowest taxonomic level possible, then dried plant and animal material at sixty degrees Celsius for forty-eight hours to determine dry weight. Ash-free dry mass was obtained by burning samples in a muffle furnace at 550 degrees Celsius. In parallel, a multi-parameter probe recorded water temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity and oxidation-reduction potential at each site, while suspended organic matter was quantified by filtering one-litre water samples through pre-weighed glass fibre filters. Statistical treatment included UPGMA clustering with Bray-Curtis similarity to group months by environmental and faunal composition, Kendall’s rank correlations for non-normal data, and Kruskal-Wallis tests with Dunn post hoc comparisons for biomass differences.

The environmental data told a clear story of stress. In the lower estuary, water temperature ranged from 10.9 degrees Celsius in January to 20.6 degrees in June, and salinity swung dramatically from 13.55 in March to 37.18 in September 2021. Upstream, conditions were harsher still: temperatures spanned 7.7 degrees in November to 25.3 degrees in August, and an August salinity peak of 0.16, modest by marine standards but anomalous for a freshwater zone, contrasted with values of 0.04 to 0.08 in other months. Oxidation-reduction potential, a proxy for the chemical redox state of the water, dipped in every heat wave month in the lower estuary and collapsed to 87.1 millivolts in July upstream, far below the 228 to 348 millivolts seen otherwise. Cluster analysis confirmed that July and August stood apart environmentally from all other months.

Against this backdrop, the two plants responded in opposite ways. Fucus ceranoides biomass varied little, averaging 589.77 grams of dry weight per square metre, with a November maximum of 770.71 and a July minimum of 429.4. The only significant differences separated April and July from most other months, and no correlations emerged between algal biomass and any measured environmental variable. The authors attribute this resilience to the euryhaline tolerance of a species adapted to daily tidal salinity fluctuations, noting that similar biomasses were recorded in a survey of the same site a decade earlier. Egeria densa, by contrast, declined relentlessly, falling from 289.9 grams of dry weight per square metre in October 2021 to just 84.8 by September 2022, with significant decreases from March onward. Its biomass correlated positively with pH and suspended organic matter but negatively with water temperature, suggesting that despite the species’ reputation for tolerating warm water, abrupt heat waves push it beyond its limits in estuarine conditions.

The invertebrate communities living within these plants proved even more sensitive than the plants themselves. In the Fucus zone, thirteen species were recorded, including the exotic barnacle Austrominius modestus, and diversity dipped during the December, July and August heat waves. Yet one species bucked the trend spectacularly: the amphipod Echinogammarus marinus, whose abundance and biomass peaked during the hottest months, driving annual abundance to 461.68 individuals per square metre, nearly double the figure from the 2011-2012 survey. This adaptable euryhaline crustacean appears poised to thrive under climate change, potentially released from predation as the shore crab Carcinus maenas declined. Upstream, the Egeria beds hosted twenty-three species, nine of them exotic, including two, the snail Ferrissia californica and the leech Barbronia weberi, recorded in the estuary for the first time. Total invertebrate counts upstream plummeted from 2,490 individuals in June to just 106 in September, and the number of taxa collapsed in the final month.

Perhaps the most provocative finding concerns which animals flourished amid the chaos. The exotic gastropods Physella acuta and Menetus dilatatus surged in abundance during the December and May heat waves, confirming earlier evidence that non-native freshwater snails tolerate elevated temperatures better than European natives. However, both species crashed when salinity rose in the upper estuary during summer, with Menetus dilatatus abundance negatively correlated with salinity and Physella acuta biomass negatively correlated with temperature. Other freshwater residents fared worse: the bryozoan Paludicella articulata and the mite Lebertia insignis were both strongly and negatively correlated with rising temperatures, while several species, including the planarian Girardia sinensis and the damselfly Ischnura elegans, depended directly on Egeria densa biomass for their persistence. As the macrophyte withered, so did the animals that rely on it as habitat.

The broader implications reach beyond a single river. Salt intrusion in estuaries is projected to increase worldwide, and prolonged heat waves reduce river flow, amplifying saline penetration into upstream habitats. The study suggests that while compensatory mechanisms such as functional redundancy and species replacement can buffer communities against moderate disturbances, increasingly severe heat waves disrupt these safety nets, leaving freshwater assemblages vulnerable to lasting structural change. In the Minho, the synergy of heat and salinity appears to favour a small cast of hardy generalists, including invasive snails and one opportunistic amphipod, at the expense of the diverse communities that healthy submerged vegetation supports. The authors caution that because sampling covered only one exceptional year, continuous monitoring is needed to establish baseline biomass levels for Egeria densa and to separate seasonal abundance cycles from genuine extreme-event impacts. Controlled experiments on Fucus ceranoides temperature tolerance would further sharpen predictions. For estuary managers across the Iberian Peninsula and beyond, the message is stark: the plants that anchor these ecosystems are not equally equipped for a hotter world, and the animals that depend on them will inherit whatever the heat leaves behind.

Subject of Research: Effects of marine and freshwater heat waves on estuarine macrophytes and their associated invertebrate fauna in the Minho River estuary

Article Title: Effects of heat wave events on the brown alga Fucus ceranoides and on the established exotic species Egeria densa and associated fauna in the Minho river estuary (NW Iberian Peninsula)

Article References: Gomes, N., Sousa-Pinto, I., & Antunes, C. (2025). Effects of heat wave events on the brown alga Fucus ceranoides and on the established exotic species Egeria densa and associated fauna in the Minho river estuary (NW Iberian Peninsula). Discover Ecology, 1(1), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44396-025-00004-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44396-025-00004-x

Keywords: heat waves, estuarine ecology, Fucus ceranoides, Egeria densa, invasive species, invertebrates, salinity intrusion, climate change, Minho River, macrophytes, biodiversity, NW Iberian Peninsula

The study, published in the journal Ambio, represents the first attempt to quantify the magnitude of taxonomic bias globally using consistent statistical methods. Previous work had documented bias in piecemeal fashion: entomologists describing ‘institutional vertebratism’ in funding decisions, botanists diagnosing ‘plant blindness’ in public perception, and conservation scientists coining ‘taxonomic chauvinism’ to explain why amphibians and reptiles attracted so little research. At the microbial scale, the problem is most extreme of all—one recent analysis found that half of all bacteriology papers focus on just ten species. But no one had systematically converted these scattered findings into a common currency to answer the fundamental question: how large is the distortion, really?

To build the dataset, the researchers searched the Web of Science database using an elaborate string of terms targeting studies of research bias, awareness disparity, and favoritism across all branches of life. An initial search in November 2023 returned 1,541 articles, which the team screened against strict eligibility criteria requiring quantitative measures of bias at the species level. Following the PRISMA framework for systematic reviews, they whittled the list down to 78 studies published between 1998 and 2025 across 54 journals, supplemented by a further 11 papers captured through automated alerts through the end of 2025. Two authors independently scored a sample of 100 studies, achieving near-perfect agreement—Cohen’s kappa of 0.89—a standard test of reproducibility in evidence synthesis.

The methodological challenge was formidable. Because the source studies used wildly different approaches—public surveys, bibliometric counts, Wikipedia page views, funding databases—the team converted every reported result into Pearson’s correlation coefficient, a universal metric of association ranging from −1 to 1. Chi-square statistics without standardized effect sizes were transformed using the phi coefficient or Cramér’s V, allowing every comparison to be placed on the same scale. The analysis then employed multilevel meta-analytic mixed-effects models in the R statistical environment, with publication identity included as a random effect to account for the non-independence of multiple estimates drawn from the same study. The researchers grouped the drivers of bias into five conceptually distinct categories: appearance, commonness, conservation priority, utilitarian value, and general taxonomic contrasts.

The headline finding is that positive biases—greater research attention, knowledge, funding, or interest toward particular species—were widespread across every study design, geographic region, and taxonomic scope examined. Yet their magnitude was generally small, with most effect sizes falling below r = 0.5. General taxonomic contrasts produced the strongest average effect (r = 0.40), confirming that plants and invertebrates systematically receive less attention than vertebrates. Aesthetic appearance (r = 0.18), commonness (r = 0.17), and utilitarian value (r = 0.15) all showed smaller but significant positive effects. Notably, the strongest single contrasts emerged precisely where neglect is most commonly alleged: studies comparing plants (r = 0.55) and invertebrates (r = 0.42) against animal controls reported the largest disparities.

Then came the result the authors describe as the most concerning of all. Conservation priority—whether a species is threatened, endangered, or data-deficient—was the only dimension of bias not consistently associated with positive effects across study designs, yielding an effect size indistinguishable from zero (r = 0.02). In plain terms, research effort, funding, and public interest are not reliably directed toward the species that need them most. Charisma, visibility, and familiarity continue to shape the allocation of attention more powerfully than vulnerability. Curiously, Oceania was the lone exception, but across the rest of the world the misalignment held firm. The implication is stark: emotional resonance and symbolism, not extinction risk, determine which organisms enter the political arena and which are left to disappear unnoticed.

The analysis also turned its statistical lens on the literature about bias itself, and found it wanting in familiar ways. Funnel plot asymmetry and a multilevel Egger regression revealed strong evidence of small-study effects: smaller investigations, often based on online surveys or classroom experiments, reported systematically larger effect sizes than their data-intensive counterparts (β = 1.88 ± 0.09, p < 0.001). Crucially, however, effect sizes showed no temporal trend over nearly three decades, and extrapolations for larger studies remained positive—suggesting the underlying signal is robust even if its magnitude is inflated in portions of the literature. There was, tellingly, a further irony: the meta-literature itself is taxonomically biased, with 72 percent of all estimates concerning animals, 68 percent involving vertebrates, and studies focused exclusively on fungi or microorganisms exceedingly rare. The same groups neglected by primary research are neglected by the research that studies neglect.

Geography offered one of the study’s few genuinely surprising insights. Despite enormous differences in regional biodiversity, research traditions, and conservation priorities, the magnitude of detected bias was remarkably uniform across continents—the same groups are overlooked everywhere. The authors note, however, that the Global South remains largely underrepresented in studies of taxonomic bias itself, meaning the current picture may still be incomplete. Within vertebrates, the team found that disparities tied to appearance were particularly pronounced: the gap between a resplendent quetzal and a drab sparrow appears wider than comparable divides among invertebrates or plants, hinting that charisma concentrates attention even within already-favored lineages.

The findings come with candid limitations. Effect sizes are distributed unevenly across taxa and regions—a classic example of the ‘streetlight effect,’ where researchers search where it is easiest to look—and birds and mammals benefit from richer distribution, genetic, and trait data that make studying their biases far more tractable. Categorizing heterogeneous studies into broad predictor groups required interpretive judgment despite explicit coding criteria, and the standard toolkit for detecting publication bias cannot capture the ‘file drawer problem,’ in which null results simply go unpublished. The authors also flag a recent large-scale analysis of roughly 14,600 conservation projects over 25 years, which reported stronger funding biases than the meta-analysis could capture but was too descriptive to yield standardized effect sizes—a reminder that the true picture for money may be darker than the statistics suggest.

So what should change? The authors argue that because the system is skewed rather than broken, no systemic revolution is needed—but deliberate, targeted action is. They propose redirecting conservation focus from individual species toward habitats and species assemblages, adopting positive discrimination mechanisms or dedicated funding schemes for neglected taxa, and encouraging journals to adopt ‘taxonomic inclusivity statements’ akin to existing diversity commitments. Above all, they contend, structural change depends on communication: mild but persistent distortions will remain socially inert if documented only in specialist journals. Just as research teams employ statisticians and data managers, they argue, institutions and funders should support trained science communicators as integral members of the research enterprise—because a biodiversity crisis we cannot see, in the species we ignore, is a crisis we are unlikely to solve.

Subject of Research: Global meta-analysis of taxonomic bias in biodiversity research, funding, and public attention across the tree of life

Article Title: The biodiversity we ignore: A global meta-analysis on taxonomic bias

Article References: Mammola, S., Fontaneto, D., Bellvert, A., Chialva, M., & Adamo, M. (2026). The biodiversity we ignore: A global meta-analysis on taxonomic bias. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02479-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02479-8

Keywords: taxonomic bias, biodiversity, conservation, meta-analysis, charismatic species, plant blindness, institutional vertebratism, speciesism, extinction risk, research funding, invertebrates, fungi