The Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development is collaborating with the Real Jardín Botánico and Ecuadorian institutions in several projects. One of these projects applied GIS technologies and statistical methodologies to find areas of high biodiversity and endemism using information about species presence. To guarantee the quality of the basic data, the project focused on five well-known plant groups on which specialists are actively working — Araceae (Anthurium), Bignoniaceae, Bromeliaceae, Gesneriaceae, Lauraceae, and Leguminosae. The goal was to compare zones of maximum diversity and endemism under current conditions and in a global change scenario in order to define priority areas for different kinds of conservation actions.

Presence of Ocotea insularis (blue dots) and MARS models (Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines) of its predicted distribution for the present time (left-purple color) and future time for 2080 (center-purple color), and its probability of occurrence (right) with color gradient representing low to high probabilities (light yellow to dark brown)

For more information, contact
Olga Martha Montiel
Jesús Muñoz