Figure 5 - uploaded by Rodrigo W. Soria-Auza
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1. A) Map of seasonally dry vegetation types in Bolivia (after Olson et al., 2001). (I) The Chiquitano dry forest, (II) the Southern Andean Yungas, (III) the Bolivian montane dry forest and (IV) the dry Chaco. The numbers point to some important sites of SDTFs: 1. R?o Tuichi, 2. Camata and Consata, 3. Chamaca, Mecapaca, and Miguillas, 4. Cotacajes and Inquisivi, 5) R?o Caine, 6) R?o Grande. B) Digital elevational model of Bolivia. Numbers represent the departments of Bolivia, 1. Pando, 2. La Paz, 3. Beni, 4. Cochabamba, 5. Santa Cruz, 6. Oruro, 7. Chuquisaca, 8. Potos?, 9. Tarija, CO = Cordillera of Cochabamba and AE = Andean elbow. C) to H) Geo-referenced Bolivian records of species endemic to SDTFs: Cranioeluca henricae (bird), C. pyrrhophia (bird), Formicivora melanogaster (bird), Adiantum rufopunctatum (fern), Anemia herzogii (fern) and Pecluma filicula (fern).
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The distribution of tropical plant and animal diversity is still poorly documented, especially at spatial resolutions of practical use for conservation. In the present study, we evaluated the level to which geographical incomplete data availability of species occurrence affects the perception of biodiversity patterns (species richness and endemism)...
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Citations
... Fern composition was measured using the first axes of a non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS), calculated from species abundance values [39], a standard approach used in the literature to assess species composition in regression models [28]. To assess the completeness of our sampling and to estimate the potential total number of forest fern species in Xishuangbanna, we used the Chao2 species richness estimator [40]. We conducted the calculation using the sample-based incidence (presence-absence) of fern species with the sites as the replicated sampling units. ...
Understanding how forest fragment size, topography, forest structure, and soil properties affect plant diversity remains a crucial question in conservation biology, with ferns often being un-derstudied. To address this knowledge gap, we surveyed the abundance, species richness, and composition of ferns in a tropical landscape in south China using 75 sites in 42 forest fragments. We then used a multi-model inference approach to assess whether fern abundance, richness, and composition were better explained by (a) fragment size, (b) topography (slope, aspect), (c) forest structure (tree basal area, light availability), or (d) soil properties (pH, Carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Calcium , Magnesium, water availability, and proportion of clay, silt, and sand). We also conducted a nestedness analysis to examine whether the composition of the fern communities in smaller fragments (0.4-1 km²) differed or represented a subset of the communities found in larger fragments (e.g., >10 km²). We found that (a) fern abundance was mostly influenced by soil properties, slope, and aspect, (b) fern species richness by soil properties and slope, and (c) fern species composition by forest structure, specifically, tree basal area. We also found that fern species composition was not nested in the landscape, suggesting that smaller forest fragments had different communities from larger fragments. Our results suggest also that soil properties play an important role in maintaining fern abundance and diversity and therefore protecting soil can help conserve ferns in fragmented landscapes.
... Adicionalmente a las medidas de importancia biológica y de vulnerabilidad, en los análisis de planificación de las AP en regiones con amplia heterogeneidad ambiental como los Andes tropicales (Kattan et al., 2004;Ramirez-Villegas et al., 2014), es importante incluir medidas que permitan conocer el cambio en la composición de especies a lo largo de gradientes ambientales de la región (i.e., diversidad beta o complementariedad). No obstante, en regiones tan poco muestreadas como los trópicos, medidas de heterogeneidad climática son útiles para reconocer el recambio de especies, al asumir que dos unidades del paisaje climáticamente diferentes tendrán un conjunto de especies disímiles, particularmente en montañas tropicales, donde los cambios en condiciones climáticas generan un marcado gradiente de diversidad (Ferrier, 2002;Soria-Auza & Kessler, 2008;Slik et al., 2015;Gardner et al., 2020). ...
La degradación de los ecosistemas en los Andes, una de las regiones con mayor biodiversidad del mundo, es atribuida principalmente a la deforestación y la fragmentación. La implementación de áreas protegidas (AP) es una estrategia de conservación efectiva para mitigar los efectos de la transformación del paisaje sobre la biodiversidad. En la Cordillera Occidental de Colombia, en Antioquia, se estableció recientemente el Corredor del Oso de Anteojos (COA, ~4169 km2), como una estrategia para la conservación de la biodiversidad. En este estudio, a partir de información derivada de sensores remotos y bases de datos, localizamos las áreas con mayor biodiversidad en este corredor, y analizamos si estás áreas están siendo protegidas. Los resultados indican que la deforestación (162.37 km2) y la fragmentación (> 90 %) en el COA durante los últimos 19 años se concentran en las áreas más biodiversas, al interior y por fuera de las AP. Si bien las AP alcanzan 30% del área total del COA, las áreas de mayor biodiversidad están representadas en menos de un 17%. Estos resultados indican el riesgo de pérdida de biodiversidad y la creciente necesidad de fortalecer las AP y delimitar nuevas áreas biodiversas.
... Metrics such as WE and PE are also expected to correlate with sampling effort, since new sets of records can only consolidate or increase the score but never decrease it (Lande 1996;Nipperess 2016), although this correlation seems to exist at lesser extent than in SR and PD (Oliveira et al. 2016;Soria-Auza and Kessler 2008). But besides the sampling effort issue, the use of WE and PE in conservation policies might encounter additional problems. ...
... Although the model predicted that proximity to universities had the greatest influence on study location preference, the results also indicated higher study location density in areas of higher reptile species richness. Regions of high diversity are often targeted by researchers due to the increased chance of observations and the known success of previous recordings 19,42,43 . While research in such highly diverse areas has been vital in describing new species over the past several years 10 , prioritising such areas could lead to other regions being underrepresented in studies 20 . ...
Understanding geographical biases in ecological research is important for conservation, planning, prioritisation and management. However, conservation efforts may be limited by data availability and poor understanding of the nature of potential spatial bias. We conduct the first continent-wide analysis of spatial bias associated with Australian terrestrial reptile ecological research. To evaluate potential research deficiencies, we used Maxent modelling to predict the distributions of 646 reptile studies published from 1972 to 2017. Based on existing distributions of 1631 individual reptile study locations, reptile species richness, proximity to universities, human footprint and location of protected areas, we found the strongest predictor of reptile research locations was proximity to universities (40.8%). This was followed by species richness (22.9%) and human footprint (20.1%), while protected areas were the weakest predictor (16.2%). These results highlight that research effort is driven largely by accessibility and we consequently identify potential target areas for future research that can be optimised to ensure adequate representation of reptile communities.
... Consequently, the negative impact of sampling bias is clearly related to spatial grain. Several studies have analyzed the importance of spatial scaling in niche studies (Hortal, Borges, & Gaspar, 2006;Pearman et al., 2008;Soberón et al., 2007). Recently, procedures have been developed to assess the completeness of a spatial dataset at different spatial resolutions in geographic space (KnowBR, Lobo et al., 2018;downscale, Marsh, Barwell, Gavish, & Kunin, 2018). ...
... The Chorological Database Halle (CDH) stores information on distribution ranges of about 17,000 vascular plant taxa. For 5,583 taxa, maps were compiled based on published distribution range maps (Meusel & Jäger, 1992;Meusel, Jäger, Rauschert, & Weinert, 1978;Meusel, Jäger, & Weinert, 1965), national and floristic databases and further maps from floristic literature (see bibliographic details in Index Holmiensis: Lundqvist, 1992;Lundqvist & Jäger, 1995-2007Lundqvist & Nordenstam, 1988;Tralau, 1969Tralau, -1981. CDH data can be requested for research objectives via http://choro logie.biolo ...
Aim
Biodiversity databases are valuable resources for understanding plant species distributions and dynamics, but they may insufficiently represent the actual geographic distribution and climatic niches of species. Here we propose and test a method to assess sampling coverage of species distribution in biodiversity databases in geographic and climatic space.
Location
Europe.
Methods
Using a test selection of 808,794 vegetation plots from the European Vegetation Archive (EVA), we assessed the sampling coverage of 564 European vascular plant species across both their geographic ranges and realized climatic niches. Range maps from the Chorological Database Halle (CDH) were used as background reference data to capture species geographic ranges and to derive species climatic niches. To quantify sampling coverage, we developed a box‐counting method, the Dynamic Match Coefficient (DMC), which quantifies how much a set of occurrences of a given species matches with its geographic range or climatic niche. DMC is the area under the curve measuring the match between occurrence data and background reference (geographic range or climatic niche) across grids with variable resolution. High DMC values indicate good sampling coverage. We applied null models to compare observed DMC values with expectations from random distributions across species ranges and niches.
Results
Comparisons with null models showed that, for most species, actual distributions within EVA are deviating from null model expectations and are more clumped than expected in both geographic and climatic space. Despite high interspecific variation, we found a positive relationship in DMC values between geographic and climatic space, but sampling coverage was in general more random across geographic space.
Conclusion
Because DMC values are species‐specific and most biodiversity databases are clearly biased in terms of sampling coverage of species occurrences, we recommend using DMC values as covariates in macroecological models that use species as the observation unit.
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... However, the total area inventoried still represents a very small portion of the American tropics. The impact of collection density on the observed pteridophyte species richness has been documented in Bolivia, where the number of known species has increased dramatically during a project aiming to document the pteridophyte flora of the country (Soria-Auza & Kessler, 2008). Such trends have an impact on the global species richness estimates as well: while ca. ...
The distributions of plant species are affected by characteristics of their
environment, most importantly climate and soils. Ferns and lycophytes (hereafter
pteridophytes) are no exception to this general ecological principle. However,
until relatively recently, little information has been available about
pteridophyte-soil relationships in the tropics. Here we review literature that sheds
light on the impact of soil conditions on pteridophyte distribution in the lowland
forests of tropical America. We provide examples of both soil-related
community-level patterns in species turnover and distributions of individual
species and genera along soil gradients. We then discuss the relevance of these
patterns for the evolution and diversification of pteridophyte lineages and for
practical applications, such as the use of pteridophytes as indicators in
classification and mapping of soil-related habitats. Finally, we discuss challenges
in filling the gaps of knowledge in pteridophyte-soil relationships and suggest
possible solutions for them.
... The geographic distributions of many riverine and floodplain taxa are limited by river basin watersheds, and opportunities for dispersal include river capture events (Albert et al., 2017). Finally, it is not enough to know where particular species occur; we also need to know where these species do not occur (Soria-Auza & Kessler, 2008). It is, therefore, difficult to reliably say if the biodiversity patterns known to date really reflect true patterns or biases in collection effort. ...
The unparalleled biodiversity found in the American tropics (the Neotropics) has attracted the attention of naturalists for centuries. Despite major advances in recent years in our understanding of the origin and diversification of many Neotropical taxa and biotic regions, many questions remain to be answered. Additional biological and geological data are still needed, as well as methodological advances that are capable of bridging these research fields. In this review, aimed primarily at advanced students and early-career scientists, we introduce the concept of “trans-disciplinary biogeography,” which refers to the integration of data from multiple areas of research in biology (e.g., community ecology, phylogeography, systematics, historical biogeography) and Earth and the physical sciences (e.g., geology, climatology, palaeontology), as a means to reconstruct the giant puzzle of Neotropical biodiversity and evolution in space and time. We caution against extrapolating results derived from the study of one or a few taxa to convey general scenarios of Neotropical evolution and landscape formation. We urge more coordination and integration of data and ideas among disciplines, transcending their traditional boundaries, as a basis for advancing tomorrow’s ground-breaking research. Our review highlights the great opportunities for studying the Neotropical biota to understand the evolution of life.
... Subsequently, we used the non-parametric Chao 1 estimator (Colwell & Coddington, 1994) to calculate the expected number of species. This technique has been demonstrated to produce accurate non-parametric estimates across landscapes with varying biophysical conditions, and is most frequently used for presence-only records (Ballesteros-Mejia, Kitching, Jetz, Nagel, & Beck, 2013;Hortal, Borges, & Gaspar, 2006;Schmidt-Lebuhn et al., 2012;Soria-Auza & Kessler, 2008). The Chao 1 estimator calculates the total number of species likely to be present based on the number of rare species, identified as species sampled only once (i.e., singletons) or twice (i.e., doubletons), and an estimate of the number of unsampled species (based on extrapolating the asymptote of a rarefaction curve) in a sample. ...
Online access to species occurrence records has opened new windows into investigating biodiversity patterns across multiple scales. The value of these records for research depends on their spatial, temporal, and taxonomic quality. We assessed temporal patterns in records from the Australasian Virtual Herbarium, asking: (1) How temporally consistent has collecting been across Australia? (2) Which areas of Australia have the most reliable records, in terms of temporal consistency and inventory completeness? (3) Are there temporal trends in the completeness of attribute information associated with records? We undertook a multi-step filtering procedure, then estimated temporal consistency and inventory completeness for sampling units (SUs) of 50 km × 50 km. We found temporal bias in collecting, with 80% of records collected over the period 1970–1999. South-eastern Australia, the Wet Tropics in north-east Queensland, and parts of Western Australia have received the most consistent sampling effort over time, whereas much of central Australia has had low temporal consistency. Of the SUs, 18% have relatively complete inventories with high temporal consistency in sampling. We also determined that 25% of digitized records had missing attribute information. By identifying areas with low reliability, we can limit erroneous inferences about distribution patterns and identify priority areas for future sampling.
... Our concepts also differ considerably from those of Rolleri & Prada (2006a, b) and Rolleri et al. (2012). Another reason for the high diversity of the family in Bolivia is its geographical position in the transition between the tropics and subtropics (Soria & Kessler 2008) and the heavy concentration of the family in austral regions of the World. Blechnaceae are also very well represented in other areas of southern South America, e.g., Argentina andChile (Marticorena & Rodríguez 1995, Zuloaga et al. 2008); quite a few extratropical species reach southern Bolivia, increasing the species count for the country. ...
We provide a synopsis to the 46 species of Blechnaceae in 10 genera currently known from Bolivia, including the description of two species new to science: Blechnum tomentosum and Parablechnum wohlgemuthii. No less than 12 species are currently known only from Bolivia, making this country exceptional for the diversity of the genus.
... Adjacent Amboró National Park in Santa Cruz has a known fern flora of 429 species even though large parts of Amboró have not yet been explored for ferns, so that it is also expected to have over 600 species (Sundue 2011). Interestingly, we have found that the least completely sampled fern assemblages are those of the humid forests, where already the highest diversity of ferns has been recorded (Soria & Kessler 2008). In contrast, habitats with fewer fern species have been comparatively well sampled, which is understandable considering that there are few species to start with. ...
We introduce the concept of a prodromus for a flora to the ferns and lycophytes of Bolivia, describe the natural setting of Bolivia (topography, climate, vegetation), briefly review the history of pteridological knowledge in the country, present a taxonomic synopsis as well as a key to the fern and lycophyte families of Bolivia, and provide a list of all fern and lycophyte names with Bolivian type material. A new combination is proposed for Polyphlebium herzogii (Rosenst.) A.R.Sm. & Kessler.
