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Track: Natural Resources and Conservation
Daniel Cole
Smithsonian Institute
Mailstop 136
Washington DC, 20560
Telephone: 202-357-1955
Fax: 202-357-4122
E-mail: mnhan040@sivm.si.edu
Testing Conservation Assumptions with Amazonian Data in a GIS
A major challenge to preserving tropical biodiversity is the need to make conservation decisions with inadequate biological data. We explore certain implications of this obstacle by focusing on Amazonia through a GIS as an example. Two major problems with the biological data for Amazonia are that collecting efforts have been extremely patchy and species level understanding of most organisms is poor. Two approaches were taken as potential solutions to these problems. One was to find a conceptual model that would be true for all organisms and that would also have conservation implications. The second was to use available distributional data, which in turn required a major assumption for their "generalizability." As part of our general studies on understanding neotropical lowland biota, we recently revised various neotropical taxa so that good species level understandings, including their distributions, are now available for groups of organisms that were not used to make conservation recommendations by
others in the past. We use these data to examine spatial patterns relative to areas of high species richness and high species endemism to critique the robustness of how well distributional data from relatively well-known groups are representative for other groups. This project is part of the ongoing work of the Neotropical Lowlands Research Project group of the National Museum of Natural History. We are continuing to add appropriate collections data as they become available from the participating scientists in the field and from collections data elsewhere.
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