| Author(s): |
Members of El Grupo Cerúleo: Barker, S., Benítez, S., Baldy, J., Cisneros Heredia, D., Colorado Zuluaga, G., Cuesta, F., Davidson, I., Díaz, D., Ganzenmueller, A., García, S., Girvan, M. K., Guevara, E., Hamel, P., Hennessey, A. B., Hernández, O. L., Herzog, S., Mehlman, D., Moreno, M. I., Ozdenerol, E., Ramoni-Perazzi, P., Romero, M., Romo, D., Salaman, P., Santander, T., Tovar, C., Welton, M., Will, T., Pedraza, C., Galindo, G. |
| Description: |
Successful conservation of rare species requires detailed knowledge of the species distribution. Modeling spatial distribution is an efficient means of locating potential habitats. Cerulean Warbler (Dendroica cerulea, Parulidae) was listed as a Vulnerable Species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in 2004. These neotropical migratory birds breed in eastern North America. The entire population migrates to the northern Andes in South America to spend the nonbreeding period. As part of a larger international conservation effort, we developed spatial hypotheses of the birds occurrence in South America. We summarized physical, climatic, and recent land-cover data for the northern Andes using ESRI software, ArcGIS. We developed five hypothetical distributions based on Mahalanobis D, GARP, Biomapper, MAXENT, and Domain models. Combining results of the different models on the same map allowed us to design a rigorous strategy to ground-truth the map and thus to identify sites for protection of the species in South America. |