Rapid Assessment Program – CI (Center for Applied Biodiversity Science)

1. Rapid Assessment Program – CI(Center for Applied Biodiversity Science) http://www.conservation.org • Created in 1990 • 3 – 4 week intensive biodiversity surveys • Terrestrial, freshwater and Marine • Focus on hotspots and wilderness areas of the world • Provide reports in English and the local language

4. What are important patterns of biodiversity at the species level? • What are important biodiversity processes at the species level?

5. Landscape Scale • Components/Pieces ? • # patch types • # ecoregions • # watersheds • Function/Process ? • Locations and rate of disturbances • Rate of transfer of nutrients or species across patches • Structure/patterns ? • Fragmentation stats • Road density • Patch size frequency distribution • Burn history

6. What happens when we can’t comprehensively measure biodiversity? • Flagship • Umbrella • Keystone • Endemics • Indicator

7. Is an indicator species approach effective ?

8. Lawton et al 1998 Nature 1998 391:72-75. • Are there correlations of species richness between taxonomic groups? • Extensive inventories within the Mbalmayo Reserve, S. Central Cameroon • Surveyed: Birds, butterflies, flying beetles, canopy beetles, canopy ants, Leaf-litter ants, termites, and soil nemotodes • Habitat types: Near primary, old-growth secondary, Partial manual clearance plus plantation, Partial mechanical clearance plus plantation, complete clearance with young plantation, manually cleared farm fallow (1 – 3 ha plots)

9. Lawton et al 1998 • Conclusions • No single group was good indicator of species richness in all groups • Number of positive significant correlations was very low and some correlations were negative • Strongly questions the usefulness of indicator taxa • Highlights the difficulty associated with surveying a small number of taxa (high “scientist hours” and many morphospecies, 12 systematists)

10. Study from Textbook (Lamoreux et al 2006)

11. Global Patterns of Biodiversity

12. General Patterns ? • Species diversity tends to decreases w/ • Increasing latitude • Increasing altitude • Some ecosystems more diverse than others • Tropical rainforest • Coral reefs • Many hypotheses to explain patterns, no clear consensus

13. How do we prioritize?

14. Hotspots • Definition (Myers 1988; Myers et al. 2000) • Area must contain 0.5% (~1500) of the world’s plant spp as endemics AND • Must have lost at least 70% of its primary vegetation • Primary conservation strategy of Conservation International

15. World’s Hotspots (Myers et al. 2000) Biodiversityhotspots.org

16. Hotspot Statistics • 34 hotspots • Total extent 15.7% of Earth’s land surface • 50% of Earth’s total plant spp are endemic to hotspots • 42% of terrestrial vertebrate spp are endemic to hotspots • 86% of this area has been degraded

17. Hotspot Importance • Last 15 years >$750 million

18. Importance of Ecoregions

19. Olson et al. 2001 • World Wildlife Fund • Delineated 867 ecoregions (now 825) • “Relatively large units of land containing a distinct assemblage of natural communities and species, with boundaries that approximate the original extent of natural communities prior to major land-use change”

20. Class Discussion • How is the ecoregion concept an improvement over traditional biodiversity-mapping schemes? • What are the weaknesses of this approach? • How can an ecoregion approach be useful in conservation planning? • Does an ecoregion approach help preserve components (pieces) and function (process)?

21. World’s Ecoregions http://www.nationalgeographic.com/wildworld/

23. Brooks et al. 2006 Science 313:58 • 9 Major Biodiversity Prioritization Strategies

24. Brooks et al. 2006