Improving primary data and using it for threat assessment and in situ conservation planning in South America

Using primary biodiversity data from the IABIN network, we plan to develop tools that enhance both the primary data themselves and our understanding of the level at which South American biodiversity is currently threatened. A variety of tools will be developed and/or used, including a nice visualization interface to allow decision makers to navigate through the current scenario of biodiversity threats and conservation. In a greater detail we will:

• Create Java-based scripts to assess the validity of coordinates reported within the IABIN database at three different levels: land/sea, country-level, and environmental-level.
• Create Java-based scripts to retrieve valid and reliable coordinates from records within the database that have no location data
• Create a Java-based script to extract primary data and model species distributions using the Maximum Entropy (Maxent) algorithm (Phillips et al. 2006)
• Assess the threat and conservation status of all South American taxa, using the outputs of the modeling and spatially explicit datasets on threats to ecosystems (Jarvis et al. 2010) and protected areas (IUCN & UNEP 2009)
• Create a web interface to visualize all the modeling and threat assessment results

We hope and trust these results will help the bunch of modelers that are outside there using primary biodiversity data for conservation and impact assessment purposes, and any conservation officer or decision-maker attempting to plan and/or create conservation actions over South America.

References

Jarvis, A., Touval, J. L., Castro Schmitz, M., Sotomayor, L., Hyman, G. G. 2010. Assessment of threats to ecosystems in South America. Journal for Nature Conservation 18(3): 180-188.

IUCN & UNEP (2009) The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA). UNEP-WCMC. Cambridge, UK.

Phillips, S.J., Anderson, R.P., Schapire, R.E. 2006. Maximum entropy modeling of species geographic distributions. Ecological Modelling, 190: 231-259.