Conservation Prioritization of Areas with High Potential for Providing
Ecosystem Services: The New ‘bivariatemaps’ R 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 computational methods that not only show where
to find high species richness, or phylogenetic and functional diversity,
but also low economic cost or even high originality or distinctiveness.
In this paper, we introduce a new package (‘bivariatemaps’) with methods
to prioritize areas, communities or species on a large scale, and we
show an example for finding the best areas for the conservation of
terrestrial and flying mammals (endothermics) and the Serpentes
(ectothermics). 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). Additionally,
we correlated NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) with
Economic Cost, to observe how we could maximize productivity while
reducing resource usage as much as possible. 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.