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Miguel
Fernandez Don Wilson, Ph.D. "At the end of this wonderful opportunity, Dr. Christian Samper’s words remain within my head: "opportunities that change people’s lives forever". The Research Training Program was one of these opportunities." |
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Testing
a predictive model of amphibian distributions for Bolivia Over the past hundred years, the human population has
increased from one to five thousand million human beings. As a result,
the pressure to squeeze this little planet of ours for more food,
water and fuel has increased. Therefore, managing the limited natural
resources of the Earth has emerged as perhaps the most crucial problem
faced by humanity. Fortunately, technologies are now becoming widely
available that may allow us to feed and power the growing population
without destroying the very environment that sustains us in the process.
With this technology we have started to measure virtually everything
on Earth and how these things move and change over the time. Fed into
special databases called Geographic Information Systems (GIS), these
measurements help us to understand what’s happening all around
us and even make predictions for areas where there is a lack of information.
To provide politicians and decision-makers in Bolivia with useful
and fast information as to which places need protection due to its
high biodiversity. It is necessary to understand the patterns of distribution
of different taxa. This project focuses on amphibians; a predictive
model has been developed with a GIS database, using information that
has already been obtained about Bolivian amphibians using Bolivian
collections. This will assist making a decision of whether or not
to protect a specific area. However, testing is required to know if
the predictions we developed about the environment reflect reality.
In order to test this model, a group of frogs was chosen as a focus
group. Using a source of information that was not used to build the
model (National Museum of Natural History collection and a revisionary
study made by Dr. Ron Heyer) the localities for ten species were mapped
and overlaid on the model. The results indicate that two levels of
improvement are needed to characterize biodiversity distribution in
Bolivia: 1) All available museum data should be used to develop predictive
distributions for each species; 2) The various GIS layers now available
for climate, soils and vegetation are inaccurate and/or out of date
and need to be improved. This research was supported by the Alice Eve Kennington Internship Endowment. |