Maps of potential biodiversity: when the tools for regional conservation planning clash with species ecological niches

Abstract

Maps of potential biodiversity are prominent tools for regional conservation planning because they allow to quantify the diversity of species that potentially inhabit different habitats. These maps are constructed from modeling species ecological niches based on the association between the geographical localities where species were detected and the environmental variables at those localities. Previous researches addressed the development of MPB for administrative regions using regional species distributions data to modeling ecological niches, which may lead to flawed predictions on potential biodiversity. Our aim is to assess the consequences of failing to include all available records on full species distribution to develop MPB. As a study case, we produced two MPBs for an administrative region of Argentina using RSD and FSD data sets of 14 species of insects and performed Environmental Niche Factor Analysis to model their ecological niches. Our results evidenced that both MPB were not spatially congruent in their predictions on potential biodiversity, because the ecological niches represented by RSD and FSD data were different in their position and volume. We found that the MPB based on RSD data may underpredict the potential biodiversity of distinct habitats at the landscape level, and that the use of this map may underestimate areas with different conservation potential within an administrative region. These results suggest that the choice of the extent of geographic records used to construct the MPB strongly conditions the quality and credibility of these maps.