Meanings, drivers, and motivations for community-based conservation in Latin America

Indigenous and rural communities have developed strategies aimed at supporting their livelihoods and protecting biodiversity. Motivational factors underlying these local conservation strategies, however, are still a largely neglected topic. We aimed to enrich the conceptualization of community-based conservation by exploring trigger events and motivations that induce local people to be engaged in practical institutional arrangements for successful natural resource management and biodiversity conservation. By examining the history and development of three community conservation initiatives in Brazil, Mexico, and Bolivia, we have illustrated and discussed two main ways of understanding community-based conservation from the interaction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. First, incentive-based conservation policies can stimulate people's economic interests and mobilize individual and collective behavior toward the formalization of conservation-oriented actions. Second, environmental justice concerns, such as international and national movements for the recognition of indigenous peoples' rights, can support local people's sense of autonomy and result in increased control over their territory and resources, as well as a renewed conservation commitment. The results are useful from a policy perspective because they provide insight into the governance of conservation development by bridging the gap between communities' culturally based motivations for conservation, which are still embedded in customary institutions, and broader political and socioeconomic contexts

Xicotli Data: a project to retrieve plant-bee interactions from citizen science

Xicotli data is the short name given to the dataset generated within the project framework "Integration of Biodiversity Data for the Management and Conservation of Wild Bee-Plant Interactions in Mexico (2021-2023)", as xicotli is the generic word for a bee in Nahuatl. The team comprised eco-informaticians, ecologists and taxonomists of both native bees and flora. The generated dataset contains so far 4,532 curated records of the plants, which are potential hosts of species of three focal families of bees native to Mexico: Apidae, Halictidae and Megachilidae and morphological and ecological data of the plant-bee interactions. This dataset was integrated and mobilised from citizen observations available at naturalista.mx (iNat), which were compiled through the iNaturalist project.The new information obtained with the Xicotli data project was:Taxonomic information about bee species curated by taxonomists based on the information contained in iNaturalist;Taxonomic identification of the host plants by a botanist from the photos compiled by the Xicotli Data project;Data on the ecomorphological traits of bees and plants based on expert knowledge and literature.All the data were integrated into the Xicotli Data Project via the creation of new “observation fields". The visibility of the information originally contained in iNaturalist was maximized and can be consulted directly on the iNaturalist platform

Case 3807 - Onthophagus anthracinus Harold, 1873 (Insecta, Coleoptera, Scarabaeidae): proposed conservation of the specific name

The purpose of this application, under Article 23.9.3 of the Code, is to conserve the specific name of a well-known dung beetle, Onthophagus anthracinusHarold, 1873, a junior primary homonym of Onthophagus anthracinusFaldermann, 1835. Onthophagus anthracinusFaldermann, 1835 was synonymized with Onthophagus histeroidesMénétriés, 1832, which in turn was included in the genus CaccobiusThomson, 1859. After its synonymization in 1846, the senior homonym was never again used as valid, thus meeting the criteria of Article 23.9.1.1, but the junior homonym has not been cited in enough works during the past 50 years to meet the criteria of Article 23.9.1.2 for automatic reversal of precedence of the two homonyms. For the sake of stability it is proposed that the Commission use its plenary power to allow use of Onthophagus anthracinusHarold, 1873 as valid despite its status as a junior primary homonym of Onthophagus anthracinusFaldermann, 1835

High variability of dung beetle diversity patterns at four mountains of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt

Insect diversity patterns of high mountain ecosystems remain poorly studied in the tropics. Sampling dung beetles of the subfamilies Aphodiinae, Scarabaeinae, and Geotrupinae was carried out at four volcanoes in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt (TMVB) in the Mexican transition zone at 2,700 and 3,400 MASL, and on the windward and leeward sides. Sampling units represented a forest–shrubland–pasture (FSP) mosaic typical of this mountain region. A total of 3,430 individuals of 29 dung beetle species were collected. Diversity, abundance and compositional similarity (CS) displayed a high variability at all scales; elevation, cardinal direction, or FSP mosaics did not show any patterns of higher or lower values of those measures. The four mountains were different regarding dispersion patterns and taxonomic groups, both for species and individuals. Onthophagus chevrolati dominated all four mountains with an overall relative abundance of 63%. CS was not related to distance among mountains, but when O. chevrolati was excluded from the analysis, CS values based on species abundance decreased with increasing distance. Speciation, dispersion, and environmental instability are suggested as the main drivers of high mountain diversity patterns, acting together at different spatial and temporal scales. Three species new to science were collected (>10% of all species sampled). These discoveries may indicate that speciation rate is high among these volcanoes—a hypothesis that is also supported by the elevated number of collected species with a restricted montane distribution. Dispersion is an important factor in driving species composition, although naturally limited between high mountains; horizontal colonization events at different time scales may best explain the observed species composition in the TMVB, complemented by vertical colonization events to a lesser extent. Environmental instability may be the main factor causing the high variability of diversity and abundance patterns found during sampling. Together, we interpret these results as indicating that species richness and composition in the high mountains of the TMVB may be driven by biogeographical history while variability in diversity is determined by ecological factors. We argue that current conservation strategies do not focus sufficiently on protecting high mountain fauna, and that there is a need for developing and applying new conservation concepts that take into account the high spatial and temporal variability of this system

Supplementary material 1 from: Kohlmann B, Arriaga-Jiménez A, Rös M (2018) Dung beetle vicariant speciation in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, with a description of a new species of Phanaeus (Coleoptera, Geotrupidae, Scarabaeidae). ZooKeys 743: 67-93. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.743.23029

An analysis of vicariant speciation of Geotrupes and Phanaeus (Coleoptera, Geotrupidae, Scarabaeidae) from the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico is undertaken. The new species of dung beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) from Oaxaca, Mexico, Phanaeus dionysius sp. n. is described. Photos of the habitus and a distribution map are provided. Phanaeus malyi Arnaud is revalidated. An updated key for the Phanaeus endymion species group and new localities are also presented. An updated key for the Geotrupes of Oaxaca and new locality records are also submitted

Dung beetle vicariant speciation in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, with a description of a new species of Phanaeus (Coleoptera, Geotrupidae, Scarabaeidae)

An analysis of vicariant speciation of Geotrupes and Phanaeus (Coleoptera, Geotrupidae, Scarabaeidae) from the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico is undertaken. The new species of dung beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) from Oaxaca, Mexico, Phanaeus dionysius sp. n. is described. Photos of the habitus and a distribution map are provided. Phanaeus malyi Arnaud is revalidated. An updated key for the Phanaeus endymion species group and new localities are also presented. An updated key for the Geotrupes of Oaxaca and new locality records are also submitted

An unusual new species of Canthidium (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Scarabaeinae) from Oaxaca, Mexico

Kohlmann, Bert, Arriaga-Jiménez, Alfonsina, Rös, Matthias (2018): An unusual new species of Canthidium (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Scarabaeinae) from Oaxaca, Mexico. Zootaxa 4378 (2): 273-278, DOI: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4378.2.

Assessment of tree detection methods in multispectral aerial images

Detecting individual trees and quantifying their biomass is crucial for carbon accounting procedures at the stand, landscape, and national levels. A significant challenge for many organizations is the amount of effort necessary to document carbon storage levels, especially in terms of human labor. To advance towards the goal of efficiently assessing the carbon content of forest, we evaluate methods to detect trees from high-resolution images taken from unoccupied aerial systems (UAS). In the process, we introduce the Digital Elevated Vegetation Model (DEVM), a representation that combines multispectral images, digital surface models, and digital terrain models. We show that the DEVM facilitates the development of refined synthetic data to detect individual trees using deep learning-based approaches. We carried out experiments in two tree fields located in different countries. Simultaneously, we perform comparisons among an array of classical and deep learning-based methods highlighting the precision and reliability of the DEVM