Systematic data in biodiversity studies: use it or lose it.

Systematic data in the form of collections data are useful in biodiversity studies in many ways, most importantly because they serve as the only direct evidence of species distributions. However, collecting bias has been demonstrated for most areas of the world and has led some to propose methods that circumvent the need for collections data. New methods that model collections data in combination with abiotic data and predict potential total species distribution are examined using 25,111 records representing 5,123 species of plants and animals from Guyana; some methods use the reduced number of 320 species. These modeled species distributions are evaluated and potential high-priority biodiversity sites are selected based on the concept of irreplaceability, a measure of uniqueness. The major impediments to using collections data are the lack of data that are available in a useful format and the reluctance of most systematists to become involved in biodiversity and conservation research.

Biogeographical concordance and efficiency of taxon indicators for establishing conservation priority in a tropical rainforest biota.

Prioritizing areas for conservation requires the use of surrogates for assessing overall patterns of biodiversity. Effective surrogates will reflect general biogeographical patterns and the evolutionary processes that have given rise to these and their efficiency is likely to be influenced by several factors, including the spatial scale of species turnover and the overall congruence of the biogeographical history. We examine patterns of surrogacy for insects, snails, one family of plants and vertebrates from rainforests of northeast Queensland, an area characterized by high endemicity and an underlying history of climate-induced vicariance. Nearly all taxa provided some level of prediction of the conservation values for others. However, despite an overall correlation of the patterns of species richness and complementarity, the efficiency of surrogacy was highly asymmetric; snails and insects were strong predictors of conservation priorities for vertebrates, but not vice versa. These results confirm predictions that taxon surrogates can be effective in highly diverse tropical systems where there is a strong history of vicariant biogeography, but also indicate that correlated patterns for species richness and/or complementarity do not guarantee that one taxon will be efficient as a surrogate for another. In our case, the highly diverse and narrowly distributed invertebrates were more efficient as predictors than the less diverse and more broadly distributed vertebrates.