Wallacean shortfall precludes what? the relationship between landscape structure and primate diversity in the Atlantic Forest

Currently, the ecological key-question is how deforestation affects biodiversity at different levels of landscape fragmentation and at different spatial scales. To answer this question, we need unbiased knowledge of biodiversity spatial distribution across all landscape configuration gradients. However, the availability of biodiversity data is still limited and space-temporally biased. Here, we assess spatial sampling bias in primates, and how this shortcoming can affect our ability to assess the relationships between deforestation and biodiversity decline in a global hotspot ecoregion, the Atlantic Forest. We predict that sampling of primates in Atlantic Forest is spatially biased towards large and connected forest remnants closer to cities and roads, consequently leading to knowledge shortcoming in small and disconnected forest fragments far from cities and roads. We used a dataset of primary occurrence records from the Atlantic Forest primates to test spatial sampling bias on a landscape perspective. Our findings show sampling spatial bias towards large and connected forest patches following our prediction. These findings highlight that the current primate biodiversity knowledge is insufficient to understand the relationships between Atlantic Forest landscape fragmentation and biodiversity loss at a landscape perspective. A greater sampling effort in small and disconnected fragments is necessary before making sound inferences about the effects of landscape modification and fragmentation in primates’ biodiversity, which can also extend to a large portion of the known biodiversity of the Atlantic Forest.