From Environmental Stats to Species Modelling...

I've almost managed to understand how a statistical prediction model works due to my Environmental Statistics report...pretty cool...but I can work on it only by giving me the R commands already in order...hehe...I'm not really a math major... so I'd rather just dive in the sea and look at all the strange species that live in there... However, once I've been managing to understand a bit about modelling and how well they can be used in different future predictions, I might connect that with our phyloinfromatics project and try to answer the question of: "How many new species will there be discovered in the next decade?"

The following graph, provided in the paper of Reeder et al. (2007) shows us the cumulative and decadal descriptions of taxonomically valid extant mammal species. It is a time series graph with some predictions in the number of species that could be discovered in the following decade. Potential taxonomic biases were calculated by the observed number of new species with the number of new species that we would expect. As seen in the graph, the trend in new species discoveries is increasing during time. Reeder et al. (2007) supports that these trends towards to new discovery description and redescription will continue, hence we expect at least 300 new species to be described in the next decade. (Source: D.M. Reeder, K.M. Helgen & D.E. Wilson (2007) "Global Trends and Biases in New Mammal Species Discoveries")