PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 6: Biodiversity: Management, Theory, and Techniques
Monday, August 8, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 516 D, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Mapping the dynamic component of biodiversity: A GIS analysis of migratory species diversity.
Riede, Klaus*,1, 1 Zoologisches Forschungsinstitut und Museum Alexander Koenig, Bonn, Germany, Bonn, Germany
ABSTRACT- Seasonal migrations are observed in all major groups of vertebrates. A reference list of migratory mammals, birds, turtles and fishes was compiled by the "Global Register of Migratory Species" (GROMS - www.groms.de), an initiative supported by the Convention on Migratory Species (UNEP/CMS).The GROMS data repository contains 1,100 global scale GIS distribution maps, which were intersected with a global grid and political boundaries of administrative units. The resulting number of migrants per grid was visualised as a global map of migratory species diversity. A striking result was the high diversity of migrants in temperate regions and highly industrialised countries. An intersection of the same dataset with ecoregions (as provided by ArcView/ESRI) resulted in a high number of migrants in areas under severe anthropogenic stress, such as Himalayan subtropical pine forest or the Sahelian Acacia Savannah. These results show that conservation of migrants will not be covered by concentrating on tropical "Biodiversity hotspots". The analysis revealed severe knowledge gaps for migratory fishes. For these lesser-known migrants, GIS maps were generated by data-mining the newly emerging federated databases for museum specimen data, made available through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (www.gbif.org). Several thousand point data from museum specimens were analyzed. Because museum data have a time code, it was possible to analyse seasonal movements, and to visualise seasonal distribution changes by an innovative, web-based mapping tool for point animation.
Key words: migration, GIS analysis, conservation, museum data