BITC / Biodiversity Diagnoses - Environmental Gaps

OK, so we've spent a lot of time talking about inventories and what we know, and yesterday we focused quite a bit on what we don't know which is to say gaps... and we already started to talk about gaps in the spatial sense essentially what is the biggest hole on a map, what is the largest region that has not seen sampling Arturo talked about other gaps: taxonomic gaps and temporal gaps All of those are kind of easy to think about It's very easy to say, "in the decade of the forties, we didn't have any sampling because of ..." When you think about gaps on a map, it's quite easy because you're looking at the points and you're seeing the biggest area that doesn't have points, or that has very few points There's another kind of gap that is a little bit harder to visualize and that is gaps in environmental coverage You can think about this, and it will all of the sudden be obvious to you For example, our roads never go over mountaintops and we've already seen on a bunch of maps the phenomenon of the "lazy botanist" where all the points are along the roads so right away, you're thinking ... do those peaks get sampled? So that's an easy way to think about [environmental gaps] For example, in Mexico, where I've moved around the country for the past 25 years or so,