Priorities for conservation of freshwater fishes in the Andean Orinoco region in Colombia

The Andean Orinoco basin in Colombia has been strongly affected by the anthropic impact. Although prioritization efforts have been done in  important areas for conservation that have included freshwater fish, they have only considered richness, endemism, and threat status which are insufficient to represent the geographical variability and the distribution patterns of species. In this work, prioritization for the conservation of fishes in the Andean Orinoco is proposed based on three approaches: identification of areas of  endemism, risk, and complementarity. The three approaches coincide in the  prioritization of the Ariari river sub-basin as the most important for fish conservation, followed by the Guamal River sub-basin, together  encompassing 72.35 % of the Andean Orinoco ichthyofauna. Although 47.07% of the study area belongs to some type of protected area, only 0.97 % of the fish records come from national protected areas and 14.8 % from regional areas, highlighting the low knowledge of the freshwater fish diversity in these areas. Environmental authorities, research institutes, and universities are urged to carry out basic research in the protected areas  that allow to know its richness and to analyze its effectiveness to conserve ichthyofauna.

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zamudio, Jhon Edison, Maldonado-Ocampo, Javier Alejandro
Format: Digital revista
Language:spa
Published: Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Bogotá - Facultad de Ciencias - Instituto de Ciencias Naturales 2022
Online Access:https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/cal/article/view/84798
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!