Delimitando áreas de ignorância: bases eletrônicas de dados e conservação de primatas na Bacia Amazônica

Abstract

Deforestation is one of the major threats to the Amazon Basin and its biodiversity. Managing areas for conservation currently represents the main strategy for in situ wildlife protection. In order to establish conservation priorities, it is necessary to gather primary biological information, such as species occurrence records. To help decision-makers, there has been an international effort to make this information digitally available in standard formats. However, such information is not evenly distributed in space, being concentrated mainly in accessible regions. Thus, in the present study, we aim to evaluate digitally accessible information on occurrence records of Amazonian primate species and identify vulnerable lacuna areas in terms of percentage of protected and deforested area. We filtered the online-available data to retain primate records, as we defined as a unique combination of a taxon and a pair of longitude/latitude records. We used a 0.25º x 0.25º grid to evaluate geographical scarcity of information, and each cell was considered a sampling unit. A Mann-Whitney U test was used to compare the percentage of protected and deforested area between cells with and without records. We also calculated the environmental distance from each lacuna cell (without records) to the closest occurrence cell (with records). We found that only 11.31% of available data contained relevant information that could be used for conservation planning and ecological studies. Only 14 of the 122 expected species studied had the minimum viable number of records (30) to perform analysis with species distribution models. Additionally, 95.56% of the cells had no primate occurrence records, and Brazil had the largest lacuna area, compared with the other six countries analysed. Overall, 64.75% of cells had some degree of protection, while 46.35% of cells had some degree of deforestation. Digitally accessible information is far from ideal, but it has the potential to reduce the Wallacean shortfall (i.e. the lack of knowledge of species distributions). Moreover, protected areas form a large network that protectes a great deal of the Basin’s area, highlighting its potential to protected primates’ populations.