Tetrapod Subspecies Taxonomy and Research Effort Metrics

A dataset linking tetrapod species to their valid and invalid subspecies counts, alongside metrics of research and public attention. It includes counts of preserved specimens from GBIF, published papers from Scopus (1960-2024), and Wikipedia pageviews (2015-2023). The dataset was created by Jhonny J. M. Guedes and last updated in May 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze taxonomic effort bias based on counts of published papers per species.
• Study the relationship between public interest (Wikipedia pageviews) and taxonomic recognition.
• Investigate geographic and social patterns in subspecies description using specimen counts and taxonomic status.

Strengths

• Includes three distinct data files: species-level summary, long-format taxonomic list, and geographic shapefiles.
• Provides temporal coverage for paper counts (1960-2024) and Wikipedia pageviews (2015-2023).
• Links subspecies data to an external reference dataset (TetrapodTraits).

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Aggregated from TetrapodTraits, GBIF specimen database, Scopus publication records, and Wikipedia pageview data.

Time Range

Paper data from 1960 to June 2024; Wikipedia data from August 2015 to December 2023.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-12 15:17:43; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Global, as indicated by world map shapefiles.