  Undocumented species represent one of the largest hurdles for conservation
efforts due to the uncertainty they introduce into conservation planning. Until
the distribution of earth's biodiversity is better understood, substantial
conjecture will continue to be required for protecting species from
anthropogenic extinction. Therefore, we developed a novel approach for
identifying regions with promising biodiscovery prospects, linked to
integrative conservation priorities, which we illustrate using amphibians. Our
approach builds on previous estimates of biodiscovery priorities by
simultaneously (1) considering linkages between spatio-environmental variables
and biodiversity, (2) accounting for the negative relationship between past
sampling intensity and future biodiscovery potential, (3) incorporating a
priori knowledge about global species distribution patterns, (4) addressing
spatial autocorrelation in community composition, and (5) weighting theoretical
undocumented species by their predicted levels of conservation need. Using
boosted regression trees and 50km^2 map pixels spread across the global range
of amphibians, we identified several regions likely to contain many
undocumented amphibian species and conservation needs, including the Southeast
Asian Archipelago, humid portions of sub-Saharan Africa, and undersampled
portions of the Amazon, Andes Mountains, and Central America. We also ranked
top-scoring ecoregions by their mean and maximum biodiscovery potential and
found that the top-20 ranked ecoregions were most concentrated in the Southeast
Asian Archipelago and tropical Africa for undocumented species richness, and in
tropical Africa and tropical South America for integrative undocumented
amphibian conservation needs. However, high-scoring pixels tended to be widely
distributed across different ecoregions for both biodiscovery scoring
approaches.
