Mapping Spatial Pattern in Biodiversity for Regional Conservation Planning: Where to from Here?

Vast gaps in available information on the spatial distribution of biodiversity pose a major challenge for regional conservation planning in many parts of the world. This problem is often addressed by basing such planning on various biodiversity surrogates. In some situations, distributional data for selected taxa may be used as surrogates for biodiversity as a whole. However, this approach is less effective in data-poor regions, where there may be little choice but to base conservation planning on some form of remote environmental mapping, derived, for example, from interpretation of satellite imagery or from numerical classification of abiotic environmental layers. Although this alternative approach confers…