Seleção de reservas: Estudos na américa do sul e revisão de conceitos

Abstract

Reserve selection is a conservation biology subarea that lately deserves lots of attention and research, and it is a powerful approach to conserve species biodiversity. this is a scientometric study of papers (n = 24) applying reserve selection in South America published since 2000. Brazil was the most frequent focus of these studies (12 articles), and within Brazil, most studies focused on the Cerrado biome (8 articles). Most biological data employed for selecting areas were about birds, and no study used invertebrates' data. the objectives of each study analyzed are briefly presented, most being: selecting priority areas for conservation, evaluating how the level of taxonomic resolution affects the selection of areas for conservation, verifying the efficacy of the existing reserves, comparing the performance of two different softwares, describing a specific software, assessing the performance of indicator groups, minimizing costs in the reserve selection process, using modeled geographical distributions of existent and hypothetic species, and evaluating the influence of the periphery of species' distributions on the reserve networks solutions. research in reserve selection is still recent and limited in South America. The number of publications in this field should increase in next years, considering the increasing global concern about nature conservation.