The Bajio region, Mexico and the conservation of its floristic diversity

In Mexico, the natural protected areas do not fulfill the biodiversity conservation demands and many of them lack of clear mechanisms for management and conservation of their natural resources. It is necessary to evaluate how efficient are those already established and to employ adequate algorithms that maximize complementarity and other biological aspects required in the conservation of biodiversity. Actually, the use of meta-heuristic algorithms, as those implemented in ConsNet software ensure representativeness of conservation items (for example species), considered biodiversity surrogates for regions still including natural habitats. With geographical distribution data, the ecological niche models of species of the family Asteraceae distributed in the Bajio region in central Mexico were carried out using the MaxEnt program. Such models were employed as biodiversity surrogates to determining important areas for biodiversity conservation using the algorithms implemented in ConsNet. A network of conservation areas (RAC) where natural vegetation still persists was built and located places considered as irreplaceable because contain species restricted to their territory. The RAC obtained shows low coincidence with the extant natural protected areas in the Bajio region. We considered this study could help to evaluate and eventually re-define the natural protected system of the region. All Rights Reserved (C) 2015 Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Institut de Biologia.