Prioritization of Areas with High Potential for Providing Ecosystem
Services Using the New ‘bivariatemaps’ Package
Abstract
Biodiversity offers diverse ecosystem services responsible for
increasing human well-being and moving financial capital around the
world. Therefore, given the natural and human causes of biodiversity
reduction, we need to use conservation prioritization methods that not
only show where to find high species richness, but also low economic
cost. In this paper, we suggest priority areas, on a global scale, for
the conservation of terrestrial and flying mammals and the Serpentes, an
endothermic group. We do that by finding high potential for providing
ecosystem services (measured here by Species Richness) and correlating
it with Economic Cost (measured as Land Acquisition Cost). To achieve
this goal, we first developed the ‘bivariatemaps’ package, using it to
plot bivariate maps that integrate the Species Richness with the Land
Cost for each of the three studied groups. We observe that more
attention should be paid to tropical countries, which have high species
richness, but low land acquisition cost. We note that more attention
should be paid to the Indomalayan region, which has a high richness of
species low-cost sites for the conservation of species. Bivariate maps
have been published in studies since the 70s, but only in the 2010s they
became more used by the general public, including scientists from
low-profit universities. We hope that this paper (and the
‘bivariatemaps’ package) helps to generate works planned globally and
regionally in the face of natural and anthropogenic processes
responsible for the loss of biodiversity that can bring us
socio-economic benefits.