Grassroots Vol 21 No 4 | Page 31

NEWS

Statistical ecology can unlock the power of biodiversity data in Africa

Henintsoa Onivola Minoarivelo , Francisco Cervantes Peralta and Timothy Kuiper

Current Address : University of Cape Town Reprinted from : https :// bit . ly / 3oKQbsr

Africa boasts an immensely rich diversity of plant and animal species . These are the building blocks of healthy ecosystems . Yet , the projected loss of wild habitats and species on the continent threatens biodiversity . Recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panels on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and Climate

Change also highlight how biodiversity loss and climate change threaten human well-being .

Good information is crucial to understanding and reversing this trend . More and more data about biodiversity is becoming available worldwide , through satellite imagery , citizen science programmes and wildlife rangers , for example . But socio-ecological systems are enormously complex and so data can still be sparse , biased , or incomplete . Not only must data be collected , it also has to be analysed if it is to be useful for decision making .

The emerging field of statistical ecol-

Figure 1 . Statistical techniques are often used to show where poaching actually happens . ( Photo by Wildsnap / Shutterstock )

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