New Free Software Helps Identify Key Areas for Environmental Protection

Belo Horizonte, Brazil – A new open-system software package for the analysis of geographic distribution of animals and plants was launched this week by Conservation International (CI) in Brazil. This innovative technology will help the scientific community identify priority areas for environmental conservation based on geographical patterns of species.

Croizat uses a panbiogeographic approach, one of the main areas of research of biogeography, which is the study of the distribution of living creatures on our planet. Before the software was launched, there was no standard, general-purpose software for the analysis of distributional data under the panbiogeographic method, which was created by the Franco-Italian botanist Léon Croizat (1894–1982).

The idea behind panbiogeography is that biotas, or the total of animals and plants in a particular area, evolve through geography barriers. “The panbiogeographic method in which this software is based views patterns of distribution of species as a fundamental aspect of biodiversity,” says Croizat’s main developer, Mauro Cavalcanti, adding that the identification of these patterns help to single out areas that are both highly rich in species and historically important in terms of evolution and distribution of biotas.

The Croizat is based on the same analytical model of many Geographic Information Systems (GIS), but rather than concentrating on database and graphics flexibility, the Croizat is designed to perform specialist biological analyses, many of which are not available from GIS's.

Above excerpt from Conservation International.