%0 Journal Article
%T Forgotten forests - issues and prospects in biome mapping using Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests as a case study
%A Tiina S£¿rkinen
%A Jo£¿o RV Iganci
%A Reynaldo Linares-Palomino
%A Marcelo F Simon
%A Dari¨¦n E Prado
%J BMC Ecology
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1472-6785-11-27
%X Current biome maps of South America perform poorly in depicting SDTF distribution. The poor performance of the maps can be attributed to two main factors: (1) poor spatial resolution, and (2) poor biome delimitation. Poor spatial resolution strongly limits the use of some of the maps in GIS applications, especially for areas with heterogeneous landscape such as the Andes. Whilst the Land Cover Map did not suffer from poor spatial resolution, it showed poor delimitation of biomes. The results highlight that delimiting structurally heterogeneous vegetation is difficult based on remote sensed data alone. A new refined working map of South American SDTF biome is proposed, derived using the Biome Distribution Modelling (BDM) approach where georeferenced herbarium data is used in conjunction with bioclimatic data.Georeferenced specimen data play potentially an important role in biome mapping. Our study shows that herbarium data could be used as a way of ground-truthing biome maps in silico. The results also illustrate that herbarium data can be used to model vegetation maps through predictive modelling. The BDM approach is a promising new method in biome mapping, and could be particularly useful for mapping poorly known, fragmented, or degraded vegetation. We wish to highlight that biome delimitation is not an exact science, and that transparency is needed on how biomes are used as study units in macroevolutionary and ecological research.South America is one of the world's most diverse continents, housing around 90,000-110,000 species of seed plants, c. 37% of the world's total [1-3]. Taxonomic diversity, however, is not evenly distributed within the continent; on a broad scale, the Amazon rain forest is home to completely different species to those from the mountain tops of the Andes, and areas differ on a finer scale in their species richness and endemism [4]. Understanding such diversity gradients, and the processes that shape and maintain them, remains a focal questio
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6785/11/27