• Home
• Science Strategy
• Science Teams
• Projects
  • Madagascar GIS
• People
• Publications
• Acronyms

Madagascar GIS

Map of threatened Orchids in Madagascar, showing areas of highest concentration.

The Madagascar GIS Project is a core activity of the GIS Unit, working with the Herbarium and the MSBP. It started as a component of the Madagascar Biodiversity Project as a pilot study, and quickly demonstrated the great potential of GIS for botanists, specifically where their work includes mapping plant species distributions, and correlating these distributions with physical or climatic parameters. Altitudinal range, vegetation, underlying geology and climate can all be mapped as constraints on species distributions with far greater accuracy than can be derived just from herbarium label data. These fundamental data are regularly incorporated into floristic and taxonomic research, but we have also demonstrated that they can be used to accurately predict and map species distributions when there are few collection records.

The GIS Unit is in the process of completing a new and up to date vegetation map for Madagascar, based on satellite data and extensive ground surveys. As well as a printed vegetation map (in the form of a road atlas with 64 pages of maps), there is a website for downloading maps and uploading new data. We are continuing the work and will add greater resolution to the maps through the website as we acquire new data. A follow-on project with Conservation International is calculating the extent and rate of vegetation change since satellite data became available. As internet connections improve to Madagascar we will migrate GIS capacity to our local office.

Our top priority in Madagascar is to facilitate the Durban Vision Process, which is to help the Government of Madagascar identify over 4 million hectares of new areas for protection (currently only 1.7 million hectares of land lie within national parks or forest reserves). GIS analyses provide scientific arguments and data in an attractive and readily accessible format, and combining specimen data, predictive mapping and the vegetation atlas is proving a powerful and practical tool for identifying key areas and priority species for conservation. We are continuing to add new data and techniques, and are working on preliminary IUCN ratings and extinction risk models for all the species for which we have reliable data. GIS mapping is already helping the MSBP to successfully locate and bank the seeds of some of the rarest and most critically endangered species of the drylands of Madagascar.

Please see our website (www.kew.org/gis/projects/madagascar/index.html) and publications (Annex 1) for more information.

Kew Home | Science Directory | Copyright & Privacy