User Conference 2007 - Special Achievement in GIS

Madagascar is a global biodiversity hotspot, due to its exceptionally high species diversity and numbers of endemic flora and fauna. This biodiversity remains under severe threat from deforestation, fragmentation and over-exploitation. Past conservation planning efforts in Madagascar have suffered from the lack of an effective biodiversity database and the tools for its use.

The REBIOMA project (Réseau de la Biodiversité de Madagascar, www.rebioma.org) has sought to rectify this situation by assembling the existing biodiversity data and encouraging its use in conservation planning. REBIOMA is a collaboration between the Wildlife Conservatin Society and Univeristy of California, Berkeley, aiming to bring the latest analytical methods and technologies from the research community to bear on conservation problems in Madagascar.

Learn more about our application: Site 1 | Site 2

Business Problem Solved

Lack of access to reliable biodiversity data hinders conservation planning around the world. Working with governmental and NGO partners, the REBIOMA project is actively involved in the identification, prioritization, and definition of legal and spatial limits for 4 million hectares of new conservation areas following a Presidential decree in 2003, to expand the protect area network to 10% of Madagascar’s area.

In addition, once biodiversity data is obtained, there are few readily available mechanisms that seamlessly convert the original source data to validated species distribution models that are useful for conservation planning, monitoring and management, particularly in the face of global climate change.

Technology Implemented

Our project is breaking ground in predicting species’ response to global climate change, developing new techniques for planning conservation responses to climate change, improving the rate of taxonomic discovery and specimen identification, and the technical integration of these state-of-the-art tools for describing, accessing, georeferencing, serving, modeling and utilizing biodiversity data.

We use a variety of analytical packages such as
BioGeoMancer (http://www.biogeomancer.org) to geo-reference biological data
Maxent (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~schapire/maxent/) to model species distributions
Zonation (http://www.helsinki.fi/bioscience/consplan/) for conservation planning

As the data that are input into these programs are all spatial, ESRI GIS is central to all of our activities. Historically we were very reliant on ArcView, but with sponsorship from the SC-GIS and from ESRI our project has recently benefited greatly from ArcGIS.

Development Team Biography

Prof. Claire Kremen: Assistant Professor (Dept. of Environmental Science Policy & Management, UC Berkeley). Worked for WCS in Madagascar from 1993 to 1998, where she designed the Masoala National Park, Madagascar’s largest protected area, opened the WCS office in Antananarivo, and trained a cadre of Malagasy students in conservation. Initiated REBIOMA in 2001.
Technical Lead John Wieczorek: Programmer/Analyst (Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, UC Berkeley). Active in biodiversity informatics since 1997, and won the 2006 Ebbe Nielsen Prize from GBIF for his work in biodiversity informatics.
Alison Cameron: Assistant Specialist (UC Berkeley) and technical coordinator for REBIOMA. Works closely with the REBIOMA staff and the Durban Vision Technical Group building capacity for conservation analyses.

Andriamandimbisoa Razafimpahanana: GIS analyst by training. Coordinator of the REBIOMA project within WCS-Madagascar, as well as the leader of the Durban Vision Prioritization Technical Group.