Verifying the Gutenberg-Richter law at small magnitudes

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Phyisab****
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So, I downloaded some earthquake data from the USGS database. I then plotted the log of the number of earthquakes with magnitude greater than or equal to M versus the magnitude M. This should produce a nice linear trend as predicted by the Gutenberg-Richter law. However, there is an apparent dearth of earthquakes at low magnitude.

Is this due to the sensitivity of instruments used to detect the earthquakes? Is this a well known occurrence? Is it affected by "declustering" of earthquakes at higher magnitudes?
 
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Small earthquakes harder to detect, not really due to sensitivity of instruments, more to do with signal drowned in noise.
 
Seems like you don't have a full data set. I also agree with billiards.