Advancing a protocol for the detection of species extirpation
This documentation is a work in progress.
Detecting biodiversity change is a complex challenge, involving many “wicked problems” that communities around the world must navigate to make progress toward the goals of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
Here we present a protocol to address a subset of these problems, with a focus on inferring local extinction, or extirpation.
This protocol is fully developed and implemented in the research article published in Plants, People, Planet. Through this documentation, we provide a walk-through of this framework, centering on a tutorial dataset.
B) Search effort, represented by GPS tracks (small circles) and iNaturalist observation traces (large circles) at Bellhouse Park, the size of the circle scaled to represent uncertainty around observer positions. (C) Search effort at Bellhouse Park gridded at 30×30m grid scale; (D) Historical habitat for Crassula connata (green) and Primula pauciflora (blue), with corresponding historical occurrence records (dots), overlain on potential habitat (black). (E) Search effort constrained by the extent of historical and potential habitat. (Adapted from Figure 3, Simon et al. 2025.)