Plant Diversity Assessment of Malesia deduced from Collection Databases

Niels Raes

The last years, potential information about the plant species’ distributions of Malesia through the digitalization of botanical collections of the National Herbarium of the Netherlands has become available. GIS applications and niche range modeling by correlating the occurrence of individuals of a species to (a)biotic conditions at the localities of occurrence, enables us to predict species’ range sizes. By mapping these species ranges, a biodiversity- and endemism value per mapping unit is calculated. With the revealed biodiversity- and endemism patterns, and turnover of taxa among areas, it will be attempted to define areas of high species richness and endemism, and to postulate the palaeogeographic and ecological causal relations of the patterns found.

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Last updated 10 March 2004