USING HIGHER-TAXON RICHNESS AS A SURROGATE FOR SPECIES RICHNESS .2. LOCAL APPLICATIONS

Recent analyses confirm that urgent attempts to catalogue the distribu tion of biological diversity may be facilitated by focusing at the lev el of genera or families rather than species. However, questions remai n over the application of higher-taxon surveys to identify networks of priority areas for conservation action. Is the close spatial match be tween species and higher-taxon richness at global and regional scales reiterated when sites are locally distributed? How much money is saved by the higher-taxon approach? And how does using genus or family info rmation affect the efficiency with which spatial priorities for conser vation are identified? We examined these issues using data on the dive rsity of woody plants in Sri Lankan forests. We found that at this loc al scale, the family and particularly generic richness of sites was cl osely linked to their species richness, independently of variation in site size. Moreover, fieldwork in an additional forest showed that tar geting woody plant genera and families rather than species reduced sur vey costs by a minimum of 60% and 85% respectively. Most importantly, while using family data in site-selection algorithms led to the loss f rom reserve networks of around 7-10% of woody plant species, using gen era rather than species had virtually no effect on the representation of species in priority sites. These results thus confirm that judiciou s use of the higher-taxon approach is indeed a valuable technique for improving the cost effectiveness of field surveys for local conservati on planning in the tropics.