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CAR Biodiversity: Understanding How Knowledge of Biodiversity Accumulates Through Capacity-Building in the Central African Republic

This Dissotis (Melastomataceae) was collected on a recent visit to Souther C.A.R.

The Central African Republic (CAR) is phytogeographically interesting due to its position between West and East Africa, and the Sahara and tropical Africa. However, very little is known about this country’s biodiversity, the only notable botanical expeditions being those of Le Testu in the 1920s, and those of Mike Fay and David Harris in the 1980-90s. Large areas of the country remain essentially unbotanised . However, this lack of knowledge allows us to gain an understanding of how and why biodiversity information accumulates.

Following the 2002 World Summit in Johannesburg, the Convention of Biological Diversity has called for a decrease in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 (www.biodiv.org/2010-target). However, a 2003 UK Royal Society report on “Measuring Biodiversity for Conservation” discussed the unavailability of satisfactory measures of biodiversity, and the difficulty of reporting accurately on the loss of biodiversity by 2010. For example, an interesting question to ask is what is the expected number of locations represented in n specimens of a species sampled at random from the larger collection of m specimens? Suppose that a species is collected at a total of k locations and let mj be the number of specimens from location j (j = 1, 2, …, k) and let  be the total number of specimens (Solow & Roberts in press). Define the random variable L(n) as the number of locations represented in a random sample of n of these specimens (n ≤ m).  The expected value of L(n) is

Although this is not nearly as interesting as a statement about the geographical distribution of the species in nature, it is still useful in understanding the information contained in such collections. To go further, it is necessary to make some assumption about the collection process itself. Of course, this is true not only of rarefaction but of any attempt to use museum and herbaria collections to draw inferences about species distributions. The relative paucity of specimens of some taxa may be related to the time since their discovery and the time it takes for specimens to accumulate in collections. When sampling effort is consistently lower for recently identified taxa, there will be a tendency to underestimate their ranges on the basis of collection locations alone. This underlines the need to control sampling effort when interpreting observed differences in distribution.

This raises questions as to why taxa are discovered when they are, whether conservation and biodiversity prioritisation merely reflect a level of conspicuousness, and what morphological and ecological characters affect species discovery and knowledge gain.

This project will provide resources for the resuscitation of the country’s national herbarium through the provision of equipment and knowledge transfer (i.e. training and joint expeditions). During the course of expeditions, new species will be discovered and the range and abundance of others will increase. These increases in knowledge will be considered in the light of species morphology and ecology.

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