Now, through its "Study Abroad in Arizona" program, 160 students, ages 17 to 22, can spend five or six weeks at the Biosphere, studying astronomy and biodiversity, mapping plants and rocks and learning surveying.
Genetic analysis, pharmaceutical development, biomimetics (engineering that mimics nature to produce new designs) and biodiversity mapping (see article) are all developments that would have been unimaginable to the museums' founders.But as the collections grow older, they grow bigger.
Methods of assessing conservation value are highly contested and have led to several distinct approaches to biodiversity mapping.
However, the uncertainties in fine-scale vegetation biodiversity mapping still exist in capturing vegetation functional types efficiently at fine scale.
Biodiversity mapping is usually a precursor to attempts to protect biodiversity, and is often undertaken in efforts to assess the conservation value of different areas.
The framework complements existing conservation planning tools and methods – such as biodiversity mapping, situation analysis – by providing context and focus for their application.
At the global scale, the availability of biodiversity maps is increasing, but analogous maps for economic factors that affect biodiversity conservation are rare, and no study has examined global conservation planning at high resolution using both biodiversity and cost information.
Biodiversity maps of raster data (Ricketts 1999; Hernandez-Stefanoni and Ponce-Hernandez 2006; Hernández-Stefanoni and Dupuy 2007; Kreft and Jetz 2007; Liang 2012) are mostly based on a combination of ground measurements, remote sensing data, and spatial estimation.
This research demonstrates the potential of VHR-EO for biodiversity mapping and habitat modelling, and highlights the importance of identifying the appropriate scale of analysis for specific taxonomic groups of interest.
