Global trends and biases in biodiversity conservation research

Science for societyWhile efforts to conserve biodiversity are increasing, research and conservation efforts are unequally allocated across different scales of biodiversity, with within-species diversity receiving the least overall attention. One potential solution is to realign funding priorities to promote efforts across different scales, from genetic to species to ecosystem. With limited funding, prioritization approaches seek to maximize impact by returning to ongoing conservation efforts or focusing on high-profile species. However, these approaches reinforce biases against more equitable allocation because a lack of knowledge about understudied groups can be seen as detrimental to conservation success and prohibitively expensive. This study shows that these biases in conservation research are long standing and still ongoing, which will ultimately lead to an uneven loss of biodiversity. Deliberate funding and targeted efforts are needed to investigate both understudied species and ecosystems.Highlights•Biases in conservation research have not changed over time•Conservation research increasingly focuses on the same suite of species•Conservation status of a species does not seem to predict research attention•Targeted funding of understudied systems is necessary to even out research imbalanceSummaryEfforts to conserve biodiversity have been hampered by long-standing biases, including a disproportionate focus on particular taxa and ecosystems with minimal attention to underlying genetic diversity. We assessed whether these biases have persisted over the past four decades by analyzing trends in 17,502 research articles published in four top conservation-focused journals. Overall, we found that historical biases in conservation biology research remain entrenched. Despite increasing numbers of conservation articles published each decade from 1980 to 2020, research effort has increasingly focused on the same suite of taxa. Surprisingly, some of the most-studied species in these conservation articles had low conservation risk, including several domesticated animals. Animals and terrestrial ecosystems are consistently over-represented while plants, fungi, and freshwater ecosystems remain under-represented. Strategically funding investigations of understudied species and ecosystems will ensure more effective conservation effort across multiple levels of biodiversity, alleviate impediments to biodiversity targets, and ultimately prevent further extinctions.Graphical abstract