IDENTIFYING CONSERVATION PRIORITIES IN MEXICO THROUGH GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION-SYSTEMS AND MODELING

Environmental assessments of regional development projects have been u sed in Mexico to determine where conflicts between conservation of bio diversity and resource extraction are likely to occur. Species-rich ar eas have been acknowledged as a priority for conservation. However, bi ological information is incomplete and biased toward accessible sites, so species-rich areas cannot be depicted directly from current biolog ical knowledge. An alternative approach to predicting species-rich are as is presented in this article. It is based on the gap analysis techn ique and involves the use of ordination analysis and generalized linea r models integrated with a geographic information system. This approac h was used for locating species-rich areas in the Mexican states of Gu errero and Oaxaca, where a regional forestry development project was p roposed. Baseline information consisted of gee-referenced collection s ites of terrestrial vertebrates. Thirty-two species assemblages were i dentified by the ordination analysis, as well as by 25 generalized lin ear models. Validation of six of these models showed no significant di fferences between observed and predicted species frequencies. Results demonstrated that species-rich areas could be depicted even under the constraints of environmental assessment in Mexico. A large number of s pecies could be used in this analysis due to the minimal information r equired for each species record. This predictive approach optimized av ailable biological information for the integration of conservation int o regional development planning.