Research Training Program

June Mary Rubis
Simon Fraser University
British Columbia, Canada

Gary Krupnik, Ph.D.
Supervising Scientist
Department of Botany

"This summer, I learned that I have the courage to stand up for what I believe in and not be intimidated by lofty titles, an important skill for a Malaysian working in the conservation field."

World Wildlife Fund has recently introduced Global 200, a representation approach of habitat types on a global scale. This approach is intended to help policy-makers make conservation decisions. The geographical unit of analysis for this approach is termed an ecoregion. Ecoregions are relatively coarse biogeographic divisions of a landscape; covering areas that share broadly similar environmental conditions and natural communities. The purpose of this project was to evaluate the ability of World Wildlife Fund ecoregions to represent the biodiversity of two asian tree genera, Dipterocarpus and Shorea within the Dipterocarpaceae family. Two questions were identified: do ecoregions exist for the two genera and if so, are these ecoregions similar to those identified by WWF? Along with the species lists, data were collected from the U.S. National Herbarium (a collection of pressed dried plants from around the world) and a monograph (a book that describes and lists plant species). Over 400 specimens were examined, representing 130 species. The data were evaluated in several ways including list comparisions, UPGMA (Unweighted Pair-Group Arithmetic Average Clustering), and track analysis using geographical information systems (GIS). Results show that 23 species out of the 130 species examined had four recognizable patterns that correspond to single or multiple ecoregions. Of the four patterns, only one corresponds to a WWF ecoregion. While recognizing that these data represent only two plant genera, it nevertheless indicates that the ecoregions are different for different taxa. Species diversity will not necessarily be protected by conserving representative ecoregions. It is therefore crucial to recognize the fluidity of the ecoregions while making conservation decisions with WWF designated ecoregions.