GIS / Remote Sensing

Biodiversity Curator Research Grants Program

TThe Curator Research Grants Program provides seed money to curators for projects that enhance the use of rigorous scientific data to mitigate critical threats to global biodiversity. Below are descriptions of two of these projects.

Committee on Recently Extinct Organisms (CREO)

The Committee on Recently Extinct Organisms (CREO) was initiated by American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) mammalogy curator Dr. Ross MacPhee and the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC) to foster an improved understanding of species extinctions that have occurred in recent times. Extinction data represent compelling evidence of the effects of ecological change and play an important role in shaping conservation policy debates.

In collaboration with scientists from around the world, the CREO staff, under the direction of Dr. MacPhee, has developed standardized criteria for analyzing extinctions that can be applied across diverse taxonomic groups. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission has expressed interest in collaborating with CREO participants to adopt portions of CREO's extinction data and criteria for use within the Red List of Threatened Species, the most authoritative and comprehensive status assessment of global biodiversity.

Program Highlights

With assistance from The Bay Foundation, the CREO project was able to complete the major task of creating the first Internet-accessible website (http://creo.amnh.org/) with the exclusive function of providing up-to-date, accurate information on extinct species. Currently, the website offers species-byspecies extinction status reports for two major groups of vertebrates—fishes (by Curator Melanie Stiassny and Dr. Ian Harrison) and mammals (by Dr. MacPhee and Clare Flemming). Extinctions in a third major group, birds, have also been investigated and were published following preliminary discussions of the CREO criteria. These data will eventually be added to the website. Investigators on other CREO panels are at various stages of database completion. Drs. Aaron Bauer and Indraneil Das (CREO Reptile Advisory Panel) have reported that compilation of extinction data for reptiles is now nearly finished. Other panels will periodically add their own databases. Curator Paula Mikkelsen (invertebrate zoology) has prepared a preliminary list of recent mollusk extinctions, which will ultimately be incorporated into the CREO database, and is currently available at: http://creo.amnh.org/. The new CREO website has attracted much attention, averaging 300 hits a day, including research queries, feedback, and discussion of new data from researchers. In addition, the October 2001 issue of National Geographic listed the CREO and IUCN websites in a two-page spread entitled “Paving the Road to Extinction.”

Applying Remotely Sensed Data and Ecological Niche Modeling to Herpetofaunal Conservation Prioritization in Madagascar

In 2001 Dr. Christopher Raxworthy, Associate Curator in herpetology, initiated the pilot phase of a long-term project to plan future expansion of Madagascar's national protected areas. With colleague Ronald A. Nussbaum of the University of Michigan (UM), Raxworthy has collected 15-years of data on Malagasy reptiles and amphibians (herpetofauna) and is integrating these with geospatial, elevation, climate, and remotely sensed data. The combined results will provide models that link particular species to their ecological niches (the signature conditions that a species requires) and will enable scientists and resource managers to predict the geographic distribution of those species, and therefore identify priority areas for conservation. Herpetofauna are ideal species for setting conservation priorities due to their variety, local and regional endemism, sensitivity to environmental changes, and dependence on primary vegetation. In addition, these groups represent more than half of Madagascar's 600 endemic vertebrate species.

To date, predictive distribution models have been produced for 11 chameleon species. The models have revealed that most species have an eastern-western domain split, and that there are unoccupied disjunct areas in species distribution patterns. These disjuncts can provide insights concerning dispersal barriers and extinctions. By including chameleons' evolutionary relationships in the models allows these distributions to be studied from an evolutionary perspective. These models are exposing exciting new insights into patterns of speciation (the formation of new species) in Madagascar.

These models enable the prediction of chameleon species inventories for asof- yet unstudied protected areas. Even more remarkable, the models have identified three overlapping areas of over-prediction that have led to the discovery of seven new species in two of these areas. Thus, ecological niche modeling offers the potential for the discovery of unknown biodiversity.

In February 2004, these distribution-modeling results, and their conservation applications, were presented to the Malagasy Government, the University of Antananarivo, and the NGO conservation community.

Also in 2004, Dr. Raxworthy submitted a proposal to NSF to build upon previous research funded by the CBC Curator Research Grants. The proposed project would further investigate areas with high potential for local endemism, and would expand the taxonomic breadth of the ecological niche models, to include other reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals.

Education Outreach The RS/GIS Lab is actively developing web-based education resources geared toward improving the RS/GIS “state-of-the-practice” among environmental and conservation practitioners. This set of resources is geared toward biologists, resource managers, and others interested in using satellite imagery to understand the land cover or land cover dynamics for a particular area. The remote sensing and GIS group is also developing workshops for conservation biology students and practitioners to learn how to use spatial data such as satellite imagery, aerial photographs, and GIS data layers and the necessary tools to more effectively monitor and manage our environmental resources.