Biodiversity Conservation in Costa Rica - An Animal and Plant Biodiversity Atlas

Biodiversity conservation has become one of the most urgent tasks facing humanity because of the accelerating rates of biodiversity loss (Pimm et al., 1995). An appropriate action to this end would be the establishment of global inventories, although the time required for both surveying and documenting this plethora of taxa far outreaches our present capacity. Availability of adequate data is also a limiting factor (Prendergast et al., 1999). Therefore, the writing of biogeographic atlases can be proposed as a practical tool for biodiversity conservation (Prendergast et al., 1993; Morrone, 2000) and hotspot identification (area that combines a high biodiversity with a high threat degree by humans; Myers, 1988; Kappelle, 2008). A very important task of biogeography atlases is the study of diversity and endemicity patterns in order to protect rare and endangered species. As Lomolino et al. (2006) indicate two major tasks of this process are: (1) to document the intensities and locations of hotspots for a particular taxonomic group and (2) to determine to what degree do different taxon-specific hotspots overlap. Although levels of endemism and species richness are frequently positively correlated (Balmford & Long, 1995), unfortunately, many times there is little overlap in the species richness and endemicity areas (Bibby et al., 1992; Prendergast et al., 1993; Araujo, 2002; Cox & Moore, 2005; Lomolino et al., 2006). This fact forces the analysis of distribution patterns region by region in order to understand what the approximate situation is and being able to identify biodiversity hotspots (Myers et al., 2000). As Gaston (2000) and Gaston & Spicer (2004) indicate, species distribution is not very uniform across the world and must therefore be mapped. Peaks of diversity exert widespread fascination, especially regarding the origin of high numbers. After all, conservation planning is based on spatial biodiversity distribution (Margules & Pressey, 2000). Another aspect of the use of biodiversity atlases that has not been previously mentioned is their possible importance as a tool for following distributional changes caused by climatic effects, especially in mountainous areas, such as Costa Rica. The study and knowledge of the aforementioned situation in Costa Rica is of utmost importance. Costa Rica belongs to one (Middle America) of the 36 world hotspots, as defined by Mittermeier et al., (2004). Costa Rica is not a big country (Fig. 1). It has 51 042.8 km2 of continental and insular land surface, representing 0.03 % of the Earth surface (Jimenez, 1995; Ministerio del Ambiente y Energia, 2000). In the ranking of world diversity, Costa Rica occupies the 20th place,