Abstract Long-term biodiversity occurrence records are key to quantify long-term biodiversity patterns and trends and inform the conservation of threatened species, but they are strongly biased in terms of the species represented. This taxonomic bias, and its correlation to societal preferences, is well-identified in modern biodiversity datasets. However, it remains to be investigated, and its basis understood, in long-term occurrence datasets assembled from historical sources. Here we investigate taxonomic bias for 38 species of large terrestrial mammals using a dataset of 780 historical occurrence assembled from 16th to mid-19th century historical written sources in South Africa. We test if this bias is related to species' historical charisma, using a functional definition of non-human charisma, supported by anecdotes from the historical literature. We identify a strong taxonomic bias, with up to several order of magnitudes of difference in the likelihood of reporting between some species. Species' charisma alone explains 75% of the observed variance, the most charismatic species being largely over-reported. This is the first evidence of a positive relationship between taxonomic bias and charisma in a historical biodiversity dataset, within a homogeneous taxonomic group such as large terrestrial mammals. These results improve our understanding of the relationship between people and the large terrestrial fauna in historical times and suggest that species' charisma is a good predictor of taxonomic bias in long-term biodiversity datasets. This provides background for modern conservation by illustrating the durability of the charisma concept and of its relation with taxonomic bias, with implications for the representativeness of species in long-term conservation studies.

中文翻译：

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过去的魅力物种：在历史书面资料中报告大型哺乳动物的偏见

摘要 长期生物多样性发生记录是量化长期生物多样性模式和趋势并为受威胁物种保护提供信息的关键，但它们在所代表的物种方面存在强烈偏见。这种分类偏差及其与社会偏好的相关性在现代生物多样性数据集中得到了很好的识别。然而，在从历史来源收集的长期发生数据集中，仍有待研究，并了解其基础。在这里，我们使用从南非 16 世纪到 19 世纪中叶的历史书面资料中收集的 780 个历史事件的数据集来调查 38 种大型陆生哺乳动物的分类偏差。我们使用非人类魅力的功能定义来测试这种偏见是否与物种的历史魅力有关，以历史文献中的轶事作为佐证。我们确定了强烈的分类偏差，某些物种之间报告的可能性存在高达几个数量级的差异。仅物种的魅力就可以解释 75% 的观察差异，最具魅力的物种在很大程度上被高估了。这是在历史生物多样性数据集中，在大型陆生哺乳动物等同质分类群中，分类偏差与魅力之间存在正相关关系的第一个证据。这些结果提高了我们对历史时期人类与大型陆地动物群之间关系的理解，并表明物种的魅力是长期生物多样性数据集中分类偏差的良好预测指标。