Biological Survey Planning Considering Hutchinson’s Duality

One of the challenges in biodiversity conservation is to complete an inventory of existing species in the world. Although various developed countries have already planned how to do it and obtained good results, many developing countries are starting with this titanic challenge. Planning biodiversity inventories involves a series of complications that derive not only from economic capacities but also from the difficulty of designing a survey system that warranties registering most species in a region. Planning adequate survey systems is challenging as not only geographical factors influence species distributions. Species distributions depend on complicated relationships between accessible areas, environmental conditions, and biotic interactions. As a survey aims to register species in a region, biotic interaction could be overlooked. However, the relationship between environmental conditions and the geographic configuration is of crucial importance when trying to identify key sites for biodiversity sampling. This project aims to create tools to consider the important role of environmental and geographic spaces when planning a biological survey system.