Thematic Network:

Ecosystems

Country:

Costa Rica

1.      Summary

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has recently completed comprehensive ecoregional assessments of freshwater biodiversity and associated threat status across Central and South America. These assessments are part of a larger effort to identify high priority habitats that lack adequate protection. The data associated with these assessments have been derived through GIS-based modeling of hydrological systems, followed by expert review and validation. Ecosystem freshwater elements have been mapped in order to represent the full spectrum of freshwater biodiversity that exists using combinations of biophysical factors such as climate, geology, and elevation. In order to integrate these freshwater datasets into IABIN’s ecosystem thematic network, TNC will create a freshwater standardized classification and fill out the standard format with approximately 200 classes that span both Central and South America. As part of the proposed work, these data will contain metadata and hosted on a web-accessible server which will make the freshwater products available for viewing through a web mapping application and linked to the IABIN portal.

2.      Period

September 11, 2009-May 11, 2010

3.      Contribution (GS/OAS)

$ 15.000

4.      State

Completed

5.      Principal researcher

Steven R Schill, Lenin Corrales, Maarten Kappelle

 Deliverables

Progress report 

Final report: