Mapping biodiversity value worldwide: combining higher-taxon richness from different groups

Maps of large-scale biodiversity are urgently needed to guide conservation, and yet complete enumeration of organisms is impractical at present. One indirect approach is to measure richness at higher taxonomic ranks, such as families. The difficulty is how to combine information from different groups on numbers of higher taxa, when these taxa may in effect have been defined in different ways, particularly for more distantly related major groups. In this paper, the regional family richness of terrestrial and freshwater seed plants, amphibians, reptiles and mammals is mapped worldwide by combining: (i) absolute family richness; (ii) proportional family richness; and (iii) proportional family richness weighted for the total species richness in each major group. The assumptions of the three methods and their effects on the results are discussed, although for these data the broad pattern is surprisingly robust with respect to the method of combination. Scores from each of the methods of combining families are used to rank the top five richness hotspots and complementary areas, and hotspots of endemism are mapped by unweighted combination of range-size rarity scores

Environmental and Human Controls of Ecosystem Functional Diversity in Temperate South America

The regional controls of biodiversity patterns have been traditionally evaluated using structural and compositional components at the species level, but evaluation of the functional component at the ecosystem level is still scarce. During the last decades, the role of ecosystem functioning in management and conservation has increased. Our aim was to use satellite-derived Ecosystem Functional Types (EFTs, patches of the land-surface with similar carbon gain dynamics) to characterize the regional patterns of ecosystem functional diversity and to evaluate the environmental and human controls that determine EFT richness across natural and human-modified systems in temperate South America. The EFT identification was based on three descriptors of carbon gain dynamics derived from seasonal curves of the MODIS Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI): annual mean (surrogate of primary production), seasonal coefficient of variation (indicator of seasonality) and date of maximum EVI (descriptor of phenology). As observed for species richness in the southern hemisphere, water availability, not energy, emerged as the main climatic driver of EFT richness in natural areas of temperate South America. In anthropogenic areas, the role of both water and energy decreased and increasing human intervention increased richness at low levels of human influence, but decreased richness at high levels of human influence

UAV-based photogrammetric point clouds and hyperspectral imaging for mapping biodiversity indicators in boreal forests

Peer reviewe

Mapping environmental services in Guatemala

In this paper, we use data from Guatemala to map areas that are important for the provision of indirect ecosystem services—services whose benefits are enjoyed at some distance from the ecosystem that provides them, such as watershed services (enjoyed downstream) or biodiversity conservation (enjoyed globally). These services are usually externalities from the perspective of land users, and so tend to be under-provided. Mapping the areas that supply such services links the supply and demand of ecosystem services in a spatially explicit way, allowing us to identify and prioritize areas of conservation interest.environmental services, mapping, gis, guatemala, watershed

Contours of conservation - a national agenda for mapping biodiversity

Despite the world-wide concern over the rapid rate of loss of biodiversity, there seems to be little clarity on what, where and how to conserve biodiversity. In this paper, we call for a national approach to prioritize the conservation needs through an hierarchical integration of the biological and spatial elements of conservation. The proposed approach seeks to independently map the biological and spatial elements of conservation and then to integrate them to arrive at country-wide maps for conservation-what we refer to as contours of conservation. These atlases shall provide a composite map of the spatial structuring of the biological and spatial (habitat) elements for conservation, suggest priorities and guide appropriate allocation of national conservation efforts. In essence, they can assist in evolving a holistic national conservation plan. We present here the salient steps involved in mapping these elements and propose that a national agenda be drawn-up for the development of the country-wide biodiversity atlases and contours of conservation