Datasets were separated into individual host species for analysis in R computing software version 3.0.2 [44]. To quantify sampling effort, we assumed that individual hosts belonging to the same species represented equivalent samplingunits. Some surveys reported unknown Plasmodium species; these records were excluded from the analysis. From the vegan package (vs. 2.0), the functions “specaccum” and “specpool” were used to generate species accumulation curves and estimate total richness, respectively [45] (Fig. 2). We also used the Jackknife1 algorithm to provide the robust estimates for parasite species richness [46]. This algorithm relies on the presence of rare species to estimate total richness, and is a better estimation of presence–absence for records that have a negative binomial distribution