Work

The Neotropical Biodiversity Mapping Initiative: Transforming Venezuelan biodiversity monitoring and capacity building

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: Tropical Latin America is home to an enormous share of the world's biodiversity. Despite its immense natural wealth, the region faces a significant deficit of reliable biodiversity data and lacks the local capacity necessary to collect such data. The Neotropical Biodiversity Mapping Initiative (NeoMaps or NeoMapas) is a long-term biodiversity monitoring program. NeoMaps has not only addressed these gaps in biodiversity data in one of the megadiverse tropical countries, Venezuela, but has also emerged as a model for efficiently surveying biodiversity while strengthening the local capacity needed to conduct these surveys. After three nationwide systematic surveys and international field courses in 2006, 2009, and 2010, NeoMaps assembled an invertebrate collection and biodiversity database with over 170,000 records of occurrence and abundance for birds, dung beetles, and butterflies. NeoMaps activities lead to direct outcomes by reducing biodiversity knowledge gaps for three taxonomic groups and training more than 60 conservationists from Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Spain. NeoMaps had a broader impact on national capacity building programs, and made important contributions for improving, sharing and applying national biodiversity knowledge.

Source: Societal Impacts

DOI: 10.1016/j.socimp.2024.100088

Authors: José R. Ferrer-Paris, Ada Sánchez-Mercado

Institution: UNSW Sydney

Language: English

Topic: Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies

Subfield: Nature and Landscape Conservation

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Life on land, Partnerships for the goals

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $300