The flounder effect: disparities in taxonomic and ecological study intensity across extant and fossil marine organisms hamper conservation
摘要
Large datasets have allowed biologists and palaeontologists to investigate a multitude of ecological processes. They have also obfuscated the ways in which our limited knowledge of ecology can affect our results. We focus on how our biased understanding of organismal natural history and taxonomy can have significant impacts on our perspective of ecological and evolutionary processes across multiple temporal and hierarchical scales, and suggest broad structural solutions to this problem.