Research

Mapping Biodiversity in Central America

Material & Methods

The data for studying freshwater fish distribution in LCA came from two sources: The NEODAT project and the STRI Freshwater Fish Collection (Bermingham et al, 1997).

The Inter-Institutional Database of Fish Biodiversity in the Neotropics (NEODAT) is an international cooperative effort to make available systematic and geographic data on neotropical freshwater fish specimens deposited in natural history collections in the New World and Europe. Currently 29 institutions in South America, Central America, North America, West Indies, and Europe participate in the project. Over 300,000 records have been captured and are accessible through project databases.

We obtained the records from NEODAT pertaining to Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia. Although ideally, one should be able to map this data directly and study the distribution of fish species, for reasons we shall describe below, this does not yield acceptable and credulous results.

The STRI Freshwater Fish Collection (Bermingham et al, 1997) was established 5 years ago at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). It holds over 10,000 freshwater fish tissue samples preserved suitably to facilitate the recovery of good quality DNA for genetic studies.