BDGEOPRIM

Database of Georreferenced Occurrence Localities of Neotropical Primates

This work is dedicated to

Philip Hershkovitz

1909 – 1997 (in memorium)

Photo by Stephen D. Nash

Emeritus Curator of Mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago.

Professor Hershkovitz was one of the most distinguished mammalogists of the world and

one of the most prominent primatologists of the Neotropical region.

In his titanic work spanning 50 years, he produced the “Living New World Monkeys”,

described 75 new species and subspecies,

published circa of 160 scientific papers and 100 non-technical publications.

Introduction

At the moment, one of the main problems for the conservation of the Neotropical primates is that there still exist many gaps in relation to the geographical distribution of several species and subspecies, a great part of which threatened of extinction (Rylands et al., 1995; Mittermeier, 1997).

A database with the largest possible number of information regarding the past and present distribution of the species of the Neotropical primates could facilitate the planning of conservation strategies and management, turning them available in a fast way for field researchers, conservationist entities and government organs. Also, it is of fundamental importance to count with the maximum of information on potential localities of primate occurrence, for use in management and translocation process of threatened populations from areas with strong human impact to buffer zones and/or ecological corridors where these populations can gain a larger protection. This need has already been verified recently in the area of the “Steel Valley” in the State of Minas Gerais and in the southern area of the State of Bahia, Brazil (Hirsch et al., 1996; de Paula et al., 1997; CABS & IESB, 2000).

From this point of view, our goal with BDGEOPRIM is to organize the scattered information available in gazetteers and in the scientific literature about the occurrence localities of all Neotropical primates, together with new records obtained by the authors of BDGEOPRIM, and make this information ready for use by professionals in primatology, conservation, biogeography, taxonomy, and also for libraries and museums.

Despite we have checked the entire Database three times, probably the users will find some errors. So, we are very grateful for comments, suggestions and communications of mistakes.

In some parts of the Database and in the maps, the foreign users should take care with some terms in Portuguese language. This occurs because we started the tabulation of the information in Brazil’s native language. In a next step, we will try to make the BDGEOPRIM available in three different languages, Portuguese, Spanish and English.

This Database is unpublished until this moment. The reason why we decided to put this Database in an Internet homepage before its publication is because a lot of people and institutions from Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, Paraiba, Conservation International, IBAMA) and from other countries (Argentina, Paraguay) have requested us information and data from Neotropical Primates geographical distribution.

We hope that in one year the BDGEOPRIM will be released in the form of a CD-ROM and/or in an online interactive format, structured in such a way that the user will have easy and fast access to all the information stored in the Database. Besides, the BDGEOPRIM should include biological and ecological data of the Neotropical primate species with a photograph of each one of them.

Objectives

In a first step, our objectives are a) tabulate all the occurrence localities of Neotropical primates listed in the current literature; b) arrange the related information in a database format; c) georreference all the tabulated localities; d) check the veracity of the information by crossing all the data with maps of primate species geographical distribution, hydrography, topography, vegetation (biomes and ecosystems), conservation units, political division, among others, and e) plot the records by taxa on maps generated through a Geographic Information System (GIS).

Methodology

The taxonomy of Neotropical primates is still somewhat confused and lacked the consensus of a lot primatologist. Only for practical reasons, in the organization of the BDGEOPRIM we adopted the taxonomic arrangement proposed by Rylands et al. (2000).

At start point, we made an extensive bibliographical review to check the information already existent in the literature on the occurrence localities of Neotropical primates.

First, we tabulated all the records listed in the gazetteers from Hershkovitz (1977), Kinzey (1982), Torres de Assumpção (1983) and Oliver & Santos (1991). Second, we searched for more recent scientific papers, including all those published in Primate Conservation and Neotropical Primates scientific journals. Third, we looked for some classical works from 18^th century, like Wied-Neuwied (1821) and von Spix & von Martius (1823). In addition, we summed unpublished records of primate occurrence from museum collections and from the field obtained by the authors of BDGEOPRIM and by a lot of researchers who spontaneously contributed with new localities from field campaigns.

All the information associated to the records (locality) was standardized in the same way. This was necessary for two reasons: a) sorting and classifying all the records in alphabetical order, and b) avoiding duplicated records from the same place and/or the same taxon. In the case when we confirmed that the information was wrong, we assigned the correct data and stored the old information in an appropriate field. When the information for a specific field was lacking or a “missing value”, we completed it, when possible, with the correct information.

An example of different ways to mention the same “locality” is like showed below:

- right bank of Amazon River, Santarem / PA, Brazil

- Amazon River, right bank, Santarem, Brazil

- Santarem, right bank, Amazon River

In this case, the standardized form of this locality is:

Locality	Municipality	State	Country
Amazon River, right bank	Santarém	PA	Brazil

All the information associated to each record (locality) were tabulated in a Database with 58 fields (see Table 1), using Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional platform, and Microsoft Office Excel and Access packages, with a license for Department of Zoology, Federal University of Minas Gerais.

In this way, we can generate consultations from the Database with different combinations of fields of information, and the output report can be viewed in a simple table (list) or in more complex table, crossing the fields one per one.

Table 1: Database information fields and abbreviations associated with the records.

Field	Abbreviation
1. Record Identification Number (# primary key)	N_ID
2. Date	DATE
3. Operator	OPERATOR
4. Family	FAMILY
5. Genus	GENUS
6. Species	SPECIES
7. Subspecies	SUBSPECIES
8. Description (Author)	DESCRIPTIO
9. Description (Year)	YEAR
10. Common Name	COMMON_NAM
11. Type Locality (Yes or No)	TYPE_LOCAL
12. Survey Area of Hirsch Ph.D. Thesis (Yes or No)	THESIS_FRA
13. IUCN (1996) Category	IUCN_1996
14. Present Population Status and Risk of Threat	POPUL_STAT
15. Biome	BIOME
16. Ecosystem or Habitat Type	ECOSYSTEM
17. Conservation Unit Category	CU
18. Locality	LOCALITY
19. Municipality or “City”	MUNICIPAL
20. State, “Departamento” or “Província”	STATE
21. Country	COUNTRY
22. Geographic Coordinates (Latitude, dd)	LAT_DD
23. Geographic Coordinates (Latitude, mm)	LAT_MM
24. Geographic Coordinates (Latitude, ss)	LAT_SS
25. Geographic Coordinates (Longitude, ddd)	LONG_DDD
26. Geographic Coordinates (Longitude, mm)	LONG_MM
27. Geographic Coordinates (Longitude, ss)	LONG_SS
28. Geographic Coordinates (Longitude, decimal format)	LONGITUDE
29. Geographic Coordinates (Latitude, decimal format)	LATITUDE
30. Altitude Minimum (m)	ALT_MIN
31. Altitude Maximum (m)	ALT_MAX
32. Altitude Average (m)	ALT_AVG
33. Area (ha)	AREA
34. Year of Creation (ha), if it was a CU	YEAR_CREAT
35. Administration	ADMINISTRA
36. Reference	REFERENCE
37. Type of Record	TYPE_REC
38. Collector	COLLECTOR
39. Year of Collection	COL_YEAR
40. Museum	MUSEUM
41. Number of Museum Collection	COL_NUM
42. Original Record Number from Gazetteer	N_ORIG
43. Change or Attributed of Genus (Yes or No)	ATB_GENUS
44. Change or Attributed of Species (Yes or No)	ATB_SP
45. Change or Attributed of Subspecies (Yes or No)	ATB_SSP
46. Change or Attributed of Conservation Unit (Yes or No)	ATB_UC
47. Change or Attributed of Locality (Yes or No)	ATB_LOCAL
48. Change or Attributed of Municipality (Yes or No)	ATB_MUNIC
49. Change or Attributed of State (Yes or No)	ATB_STATE
50. Change or Attributed of Country (Yes or No)	ATB_COUNTR
51. Change or Attributed of Altitude (Yes or No)	ATB_ALT
52. Change or Attributed of Area (Yes or No)	ATB_AREA
53. Change or Attributed of GCs (Yes or No)	ATB_CGS
54. Change or Attributed of GCs with ArcGIS (Yes or No)	ATB_ARCGIS
55. Change or Attributed of GCs with Garmin (Yes or No)	ATB_GARMIN
56. Change or Attributed of GCs with Expedia (Yes or No)	ATB_EXPED
57. Change or Attributed of GCs with SURAPA (Yes or No)	ATB_SURAPA
58. Observations	OBS

Nearly all the geo-political data not available in the scientific papers checked in this work we obtained from official publications, multimedia products and online services released by governmental agencies, non-governmental agencies and other institutions, like:

IBGE (www.ibge.net/home/default.php),

SURAPA CD-Rom (http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/elan/may99/msg00799.html),

ESRI ArcData Online (www.esri.com/company/free.html),

Expedia.com Maps Online (www.expedia.com/pub/agent.dll?qscr=mmfn&&zz=1025540067958&)

USGS (http://edc.usgs.gov/geodata/),

UNEP/GRID (http://grid2.cr.usgs.gov/),

Garmin MapSource World Atlas (www.garmin.com/cartography/),

GEOMinas (www.geominas.mg.gov.br/),

and other printed World Atlases.

On other hand, in the information standardizing process, we used a lot of abbreviations related with geographic names, Brazilian states, conservation units categories, IUCN categories, museums, and so on, even if it was a Type-Locality. For easy identification, we produced specific tables for each set of abbreviations.

After the tabulation of all the records, we linked the Database with a Geographic Information System, using three fields of information: the record identification number (N_ID) and the geographic coordinates (longitude and latitude). So, the Database becomes georreferenced. This means that it is possible to plot any field of information on a projected map, showing the records on its actual geographic position and in a scaled distance. Unfortunately, that was impossible to locate 39 records because they didn’t came with geographic coordinates and we could not find the exact location. So, these 39 records are not visible on the maps.

Because the Neotropical primates distribution embraces South America (southern hemisphere) and Central America (northern hemisphere), we used a world Geographic Coordinate System and WGS84 datum (World Geographic System 1984). So, we avoided some problems with displacement and data matching, and it goes easier to combine “overlays” from different sets of data.

All the maps were generated using ArcGIS v. 8.1 (ESRI, 2001) with a license for Department of Zoology, Federal University of Minas Gerais. In a first step, we produced maps for all 18 genera, showing the records (points) only by species level. The next step is producing maps by species, showing the records by subspecies level.

In this first step, we decide to not trace “biogeographic lines” delimiting the different species of each genus. This is because the geographic distribution of some species are not clear and doing this kind of delimitation demands a lot of time, and makes necessary take in consideration natural boundaries like, rivers, mountain ridges, historic factors and so on.

Results

At the present stage, the BDGEOPRIM consists of 5,631 records, embracing all the 18 Neotropical genera, 110 species and 205 subspecies of 21 countries from Central and South America. From the total of records, only 31.0% are from Conservation Units and 17.8% represent specimens from museums collections.

Below we show a summary of the preliminary results obtained until the moment.

- 487 bibliographical references were reviewed, among them, naturally, the classic works (gazetteer) of Hershkovitz (1977) with 807 records, Kinzey (1982) with 679 records, and Oliver & Santos (1991) with 516 records, but there are other 45 references with more than 50 records. Besides, Hershkovitz (1977) gazetteer appears with 655 records that were cited at first time and 472 records that are exclusive citations.

- the total of tabulated records are 5,631.

- in terms of genera, Alouatta appears with 1,166 records, Cebus with 894, Callithrix with 665, Saguinus with 616, Callicebus with 545, citing only the ones with the greatest frequency.

- the records refer to all the countries of Central and South America, Brazil appearing with 3,680 records, Bolivia with 431, Venezuela with 379, Peru with 299, Colombia with 227, citing only the ones with the greatest frequency.

- from the view point of threatened primate species, 304 records are from Critically Endangered (CR) IUCN category, 632 records from Endangered (EN) category, 1.078 records from Vulnerable (VU) category, 2.922 records from Low Risk (LR) category, and 20 records from Deficient Data (DD) category.

- in relation to the biomes, just considering the Brazilian ones, we have 2,429 from the Amazon Forest, 1,843 from the Atlantic Forest, 367 from Cerrado, 84 from Caatinga and 23 from Pantanal Matogrossense.

- in terms of protected areas representativeness, 1,746 records are from Conservation Units, number that corresponds to 31.0% of total records. The majority of these records came from National Parks.

- the records from museum collections area not well represented, because we don’t have make a more detailed survey. So, at the moment, 1,003 records are from museum specimens, representing 17.8% of total records.

Future Products

We hope that in one year the BDGEOPRIM will be released in three different languages (Portuguese, Spanish and English), and in a CD-ROM format and/or in an online interactive access, structured in such a way that the user will have easy and fast access to all the information stored in the Database. Besides, the BDGEOPRIM should include biological and ecological data of the Neotropical primate species, with a picture of each one of them.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation, Grant CP FY02/007, for the financial support; to Luiz Paulo de S. Pinto and Carlos A. Bouchardet from Conservation International / Brazil, for technical and financial tasks related with the Database administration; to Felipe B.C. de Sousa and Elizangela M. dos Santos for their help with data tabulation; to Germán A. Bohorquez Mahecha from UFMG for his comments and help with Colombian administrative division and localities; to Anthony B. Rylands and Tom Brooks from CABS / CI for their incentive, comments and suggestions; to Roberto Cavalcanti from CI / Brasil for his suggestions and comments about the homepage; to Claudia M. Jacobi for her patience in revising the English version; to João P.R. Silva, Webmaster from ICBNet, for his help with the homepage management, and to a lot of researchers and colleagues who spontaneously contributed with field records about new primates occurrence localities.

Correct Reference Citation:

Hirsch, A.; Dias, L.G.; Martins, L. de O.; Campos, R.F.; Resende, N.A.T. and Landau, E.C. (in prep.). Database of Georreferenced Occurrence Localities of Neotropical Primates. Department of Zoology / UFMG, Belo Horizonte. http://www.icb.ufmg.br/~primatas/home_bdgeoprim.htm and CD-Rom.

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