On the misuse of historical data to set conservation baselines: wolves in Spain as an example

• Main Authors: Clavero, Miguel, García-Reyes, Antón, Fernández-Gil, Alberto, Revilla, Eloy, Fernández, Néstor
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Center for Open Science 2022
• Subjects: Canis lupus
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/z6be4

Long-term approaches are needed to accurately assess the magnitude of biodiversity change. Mining historical documents that include wildlife citations is a promising approach to describe past species distributions and derive conservation baselines. However, historical species records have multiple biases (just as contemporary ones) and ignoring them can produce distorted views of past species distributions and misinform present-day environmental management. Here, we use recently published historical analyses of wolf (Canis lupus) range in Spain to show that failing to recognise and correct the information gaps and biases of the original data leads to a misrepresentation of the historical range of the species and a downgrading of conservation targets. We thus call for the implementation of modelling approaches, ideally using absences or informed pseudo-absences together with species records, to estimate historical species distributions.