GreenMaps: a Tool for Addressing the Wallacean Shortfall in the Global Distribution of Plants

The exponential growth of species occurrence data can facilitate dynamic biodiversity analyses. However, raw biodiversity data alone should not be used indiscriminately due to inherent sampling biases, impediments that contribute to Wallacean shortfall (i.e. the paucity of species geographic information). It has been suggested that Wallacean shortfall is a common phenomenon across taxa, however, there is no global assessment geared toward overcoming this impediment for plants, despite the fundamental role of plants in ecosystem stability, food security and biodiversity conservation. Here, I present GreenMaps, a new tool that will permit a rapid initial assessment of the Wallacean shortfall for plants by building base maps of species predicted distributions upon which citizen science participation could contribute to spatial validation of the actual range occupied by species. The initial stages of GreenMaps have now been accomplished, providing a massive dataset of modeled range maps for over 194,000 vascular plant species. This will make it the largest and only global assessment of geographic distributions for plant species at scales relevant to research and conservation. Ultimately, GreenMaps will interface with a mobile application to enable volunteers from any region of the world to validate predicted species distributions to be used for the generation of new and improved global map of plant distributions.