Map of Life and The Field Museum win MacArthur Foundation grant
The Yale-led Map of Life project and The Field Museum in Chicago have won a $300,000 MacArthur Foundation grant to support conservation decisions in South America.
The two institutions will work with park services and wildlife agencies in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia to improve conservation actions by harnessing better information about biodiversity. They will develop online dashboards to provide park managers with demand-driven, actionable biodiversity information such as lists of species expected in a particular location and estimates of their distribution trends. Park staff and visitors will use the service, which will be tailored to each park reserve area.
Map of Life is an online platform for species distributions, led by Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and director of the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change. “The new tools will provide biodiversity information specific to single parks and offer reserve managers basic analysis and reporting tools on data gaps and actual conservation gaps in their reserve system,” Jetz said.
Map of Life’s partner in the project, The Field Museum, has helped protect 23 million acres of wilderness in the tropical Andes through its Keller Science Action Center.
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