BITC / Biodiversity Diagnoses - Environmental Gaps
0 (0 Likes / 0 Dislikes)
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,