Fish Biodiversity in México
Lying at the confluence of the Nearctic and Neotropical faunal regions, west central México is a biodiversity ‘hotspot’ with many species being found nowhere else in the world. This area is also one of the most densely populated habitats on the planet with rapid urban, agricultural and industrial growth having already led to widespread degradation of the region’s watersheds. In this study, we are …
1) Exploring how native biodiversity has been impacted by human exploitation of watersheds so that we can delineate hotspots of remaining diversity that are priorities for conservation. To accomplish this, we identified 150 freshwater localities in west central Mexico for which there is good historic information on fish assemblages. We then exhaustively re-sampled the fish communities at all of these locations in the summer of 2006 so that we could characterize and map the remaining diversity (see below).
2) Using species phylogeny to determine if extinction is non-random. We have built a phylogenetic supertree from previously published phylogenies of the fish species of west central Mexico. From this, we are exploring whether evolutionary history is a useful tool for predicting which species are most susceptible to human impact.
This project is being led by Matthew Helmus – a Ph.D. student working in Tony Ives lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Matt has just recenlty completed our the collection and analysis of data, so he will be submitting his results for publication soon.
Collaborators
- Matthew Helmus, Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Anthony Ives, Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Edmundo Díaz Pardo, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales-Biología, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro
