Abstracts

Diversity of the Fauna

Mapping is effective way of representation of the data about the wildlife communities for the large territories. But the drawing up of maps of the communities for large taxonomic groups (classes and, especially, groups of classes) requires the large expenses of forces and time for processing huge amount of the rather diverse data on different groups of wildlife. The modern geoinformation technologies allow to simplify essentially the decision of this task.

GIS "Terrestrial vertebrate communities of Russia" was developed in Dept. of Biogeography from a beginning 1990-th. Its basis is the special original map reflecting spatial differentiation of vertebrate habitats. It is based on a map of vegetation of scale 1:4000000 with attraction of special maps of a nature and economy of larger scale. Each cell of this habitats map is the combination of biotop variants, combined on territory, specific to community and sufficient to its reproduction. The electronic version of the map is created by means of MapInfo 5.0 Professional GIS-package. 815 cells of the map have unique numbers, to which the factual data about the vertebrate communities contained in the Database is connected. There are also additional layers of a map containing the common geographical information.

The Database (DB) of the GIS is created by means of FoxPro 2.6 DBMS (version for DOS and Windows). It is a set of the related tables (DBF-files) organized in blocks: the lists of vertebrate species for everyone cell of basic habitats map with the indication of an abundance of each species in a 5-mark scale; taxonomic categories; ecology-morphological classification; the characteristics of habitats. There is a basic list of vertebrate species of Russia (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians), where each species is connected to the appropriate categories of classification blocks. The main table in DB (lists of species) contains more than 100000 records, at its creation more than 1000 references are used. DB is periodically updated and is supplemented by the new information, the development of new blocks is working out. The data processing in DB is carried out by a set of the original software also written in the FoxPro programming language.

The interaction of DB with the electronic basis habitats map in MapInfo environment allows operatively to generate zoogeographial maps of various themes - from maps of separate species and groups habitat areas up to maps of the communities at a levels of separate vertebrate groups and their communities as a whole. Creation of maps of distribution of various calculated parameters is also possible - for example, indexes of a biological diversity. A number of concrete maps of various themes were published earlier.

Note. Abstracts are published in author's edition

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