Patricia Koleff

Strategic Actions to Value, Conserve, and Restore the Natural Capital of Megadiversity Countries: The Case of Mexico

Decisionmakers need updated, scientifically sound and relevant information to implement appropriate policy measures and make innovative commitments to halt biodiversity loss and improve human well-being. Here, we present a recent science-based synthesis on the biodiversity and ecosystem services of Mexico, intended to be a tool for policymakers. We describe the methodological approach used to undertake such an assessment and highlight the major findings. Organized into five volumes and originally written in Spanish (Capital Natural de México), it summarizes the available knowledge on the components, structure, and functioning of the biodiversity of Mexico; the threats and trajectories of anthropogenic impact, together with its conservation status; and the policies, institutions, and instruments available for its sustainable management. We stress the lessons learned that can be useful for similar exercises in other megadiverse developing countries and identify major gaps and strategic actions to conserve the natural capital in light of the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Is transgenic maize what Mexico really needs

23 genetic diversity that has been revealed in the recent study. Much debate, some of it scientifically based, has taken place about the risks and benefits of allowing experimental trials of transgenic maize in a center of genetic diversity for the same crop. It is our opinion that some relevant questions about the potential impacts of transgenic maize on landraces have not been addressed either in these discussions or by experiments. For example, further experimental work is required to establish the potential for gene flow from transgenic maize to landraces, measures for managing this gene flow and the potential long-term impact of gene flow on landraces. If gene flow from transgenic maize to landraces occurs, several other questions arise. How will intellectual property issues interact with the biological, social and economic reality of small-farmer agricultural practices that maintain and keep generating new variability in maize landraces in Mexico? What are the practical consequences for a small subsistence farmer cultivating native landraces of maize and finding his crops contain genes from transgenic plants? What is the legal position of such a farmer and is he/she likely to be infringing patents by cultivating or exchanging (knowingly or not) seeds that contain transgenes? What would be the stance of agbiotech companies in pursuing their intellectual property and licenses in such situations? Such questions need to be considered both at the small rural community level and nationally. There is also the broader issue of the extent to which introduction of transgenic maize will provide solutions to existing problems for Mexican agriculture, such as the migration of male peasants (especially young people) to cities and abroad, an increasingly older rural population, the absence of effective mechanisms and incentives to cultivate maize landraces in a certified manner, weak market and grain distribution arrangements, and increasingly dominant patterns of food consumption based on foreign models of fast foods. Mexico does not yet have in place a working and efficient mechanism for monitoring cross-pollination and gene flow under local agricultural conditions, despite claims that this is being instituted8. Information is lacking on the value that transgenic maize has for Mexican farming systems and its management requirements. Meanwhile, illegal transgenic maize introductions have been documented, and in some cases prosecuted, in Mexico. Moreover, there are concerns about the Even so, as Peccoud et al. point out, full sequence information is often essential to reproduce the findings reported in papers in the area of synthetic biology. As such, on a case-by-case basis, Nature Biotechnology will encourage authors of such papers to lodge the sequences of the constructs used in a paper in GenBank together with the corresponding accession numbers.

Restoration planning to guide Aichi targets in a megadiverse country

Ecological restoration has become an important strategy to conserve biodiversity and ecosystems services. To restore 15% of degraded ecosystems as stipulated by the Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi target 15, we developed a prioritization framework to identify potential priority sites for restoration in Mexico, a megadiverse country. We used the most current biological and environmental data on Mexico to assess areas of biological importance and restoration feasibility at national scale and engaged stakeholders and experts throughout the process. We integrated 8 criteria into 2 components (i.e., biological importance and restoration feasibility) in a spatial multicriteria analysis and generated 11 scenarios to test the effect of assigning different component weights. The priority restoration sites were distributed across all terrestrial ecosystems of Mexico; 64.1% were in degraded natural vegetation and 6% were in protected areas. Our results provide a spatial guide to where restoration could enhance the persistence of species of conservation concern and vulnerable ecosystems while maximizing the likelihood of restoration success. Such spatial prioritization is a first step in informing policy makers and restoration planners where to focus local and large-scale restoration efforts, which should additionally incorporate social and monetary cost-benefit considerations.

Integrating expert knowledge and ecological niche models to estimate Mexican primates’ distribution

Ecological niche modeling is used to estimate species distributions based on occurrence records and environmental variables, but it seldom includes explicit biotic or historical factors that are important in determining the distribution of species. Expert knowledge can provide additional valuable information regarding ecological or historical attributes of species, but the influence of integrating this information in the modeling process has been poorly explored. Here, we integrated expert knowledge in different stages of the niche modeling process to improve the representation of the actual geographic distributions of Mexican primates (Ateles geoffroyi, Alouatta pigra, and A. palliata mexicana). We designed an elicitation process to acquire information from experts and such information was integrated by an iterative process that consisted of reviews of input data by experts, production of ecological niche models (ENMs), and evaluation of model outputs to provide feedback. We built ENMs using the maximum entropy algorithm along with a dataset of occurrence records gathered from a public source and records provided by the experts. Models without expert knowledge were also built for comparison, and both models, with and without expert knowledge, were evaluated using four validation metrics that provide a measure of accuracy for presence-absence predictions (specificity, sensitivity, kappa, true skill statistic). Integrating expert knowledge to build ENMs produced better results for potential distributions than models without expert knowledge, but a much greater improvement in the transition from potential to realized geographic distributions by reducing overprediction, resulting in better representations of the actual geographic distributions of species. Furthermore, with the combination of niche models and expert knowledge we were able to identify an area of sympatry between A. palliata mexicana and A. pigra. We argue that the inclusion of expert knowledge at different stages in the construction of niche models in an explicit and systematic fashion is a recommended practice as it produces overall positive results for representing realized species distributions.