Knowledge about botanical diversity and vegetation
ecology serves as one of the most important foundations for scientific
studies in areas like the Andes-Amazon region of southeastern Peru.
Studies of mammals, birds, insects, and other animals in the field
eventually connect, at least in part, with botanical questions and
activities.
Researchers focused on
wildlife ecology and behavioral investigations in the field always have
many
botanical questions. Every good mammalogist needs a good botanist
as a friend and colleague. This is true in the temperate zones where
plant diversity could number in the hundreds of species for local
prairie or deciduous forest remnants. And it is true in the megadiverse
tropical forests, where we are dealing with several thousand species or
more across multiple spatial scales of a landscape that is still
covered by vast tropical wilderness.
Animals
rely on plants for survival. They rely on the habitats and vegetation
types provided by communities of plants. Their distribution and family
sizes are limited by the abundance of plant food they have available,
in most cases. Even the jaguars, raptors, and other carnivores rely on
plants indirectly because they prey on organisms that rely on plants.
To
understand a diverse array of animals and their ecology and
conservation status in the Andes-Amazon region of Peru while we still
have a chance, we must start by understanding what they eat and what
habitats across the landscape are required for their survival.
We
are working to answer a set of questions specific to interactions
between plants and animals. For example, one of our integrated
approaches to studying organisms involves investigations of the
relationships between plant phenology, frugivory, and the distribution
of large landscape animal species (tapir) and small invertebrate
indicator taxa (insects) across the landscape in time and space.
Our five-year dataset from continued monitoring of flowering and fruiting
patterns (phenology) is being analyzed to understand the availability
of fruits in time and space across the landscape. Information about the
plant and habitat diversity across the landscape will be integrated
with watershed, hydrology, and flood-stage modeling to gain a more
integrated picture of the complexity and dynamics across the landscape,
and specifically how two major groups of organisms (mammals and
insects) interact with plants, vegetation, and the landscape.
In August of 2005 AABP went live with the first version of Atrium (R), a comprehensive botanical database comprised of data and images from
botanical exploration in the Andes-Amazon region of southeastern Peru. Atrium has been continually updated and provides a web-based platform for merging specimen/collection data with species information via species pages, literature citations, GIS layers, ecological data, environmental data, and images. Atrium features include:
Digital Herbarium
Vegetation Surveys
Geospatial Data Repository
Weather Data
Field Database
These database modules include data for more than 6500
species of plants of the study region. Atrium also provides interfaces for publishing
dynamic descriptions, Field Guides, Annotation Labels, maps and analysis of weather data for the Andes-Amazon region.
Read more about the phenological side of the project.