Island Biogeography — Biodiversity Patterns in French Polynesia

✦ Context

This project constitutes my Master’s thesis, carried out at the Ifremer Pacific Center (Tahiti, French Polynesia) under the supervision of Dr. Cristián Monaco, as part of my MSc in Mathematical & Computational Biology at Aix-Marseille University (CENTURI). It led to a peer-reviewed publication in Scientific Reports (2025) and an open dataset on SEANOE.

The work addresses a critical gap: despite French Polynesia’s status as a marine biodiversity hotspot, no comprehensive, curated biogeographic dataset existed for the region. Using data from GBIF and 56 complementary sources, we built the first such dataset and investigated the sampling biases structuring it.

✦ Tools & Skills

R GBIF / OBIS QGIS worrms vegan sampbias ggplot2 Jaccard dissimilarity PCoA Bayesian accessibility bias α & β diversity Taxonomic validation Big data cleaning

✦ Key Findings

156,727 curated occurrences across 7,101 species — with taxonomic reliability of 97–98%. Species richness is heavily concentrated in the Society archipelago (71% of marine species), while Tuamotu and Gambier remain severely under-surveyed. Inventory completeness ranges from 1.9 to 98.4% across islands. Roads, ports, and airports are the dominant accessibility bias factors in both marine and terrestrial datasets. A positive correlation between marine and terrestrial species richness was observed across archipelagos.

✦ Outputs

📄 Master thesis (PDF) 📰 Scientific Reports (2025) 🗃 Open dataset (SEANOE)