Mapping Amazonian biodiversity at multiple scales by integrating geology and ecology

Abstract

The Amazon basin supports the largest continuous tropical rain forest of the world, and harbors a spectacular species diversity of both plants and animals. This very high diversity is a partial cause for the incomplete understanding of how Amazonian forest communities are assembled, and how the species are distributed in space. A wide range of environmental parameters should be investigated within different spatial and temporal scales. This underlines the importance of understanding how species and biotic communities relate to various environmental variables. The knowledge on Amazonian vegetation is far from satisfactory to furnish conclusive answers to understand the main control on species diversity and distribution. This makes many activities in conservation and utilization of Amazonian species very difficult and also hinders scientific research on ecology, biogeography and evolution of the biota. A new approach has been to relate vegetation patterns to the late Quatemary depositional dynamics, but this needs further investigation integrating the characterization of the physical environment in space and time and of plant species diversity and distribution in the modem and ancient setting. In the present project, floristic information will be analyzed together with environmental properties. The aim is to identify characteristics of relevance to approach the causes of species distribution at the regional and local scales, and establish models for predicting species distribution. The proposed cooperative work between the Finish and Brazilian research teams constitutes an important effort to reach these goals. Both teams have concentrated their research on the analysis of Amazonian plant species distribution taking into account environmental Controls. The main emphasis of the Finish group has been plant species modeling, while the main topic of the Brazilian team has been focused on geoscience data acquisition aiming the reconstruction of Amazonian paleolandscapes. Therefore, these groups have common scientific interests, and their link into a cooperative project is more than natural. For the present project, the investigation will follow an integrated approach combining remote sensing with geological and botanical field data that can contribute to unravel the main variables influencing species distribution and generate predictive models within a multiscale framework. (AU)