Selecting areas to protect the biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems in a semiarid Mediterranean region using water beetles

摘要

1. In this work, carried out in the province of Murcia, a representative semi-arid area of the Iberian Peninsula, water beetles were used as indicators to identify the aquatic ecosystems with the highest interest for conservation. For that purpose, an iterative algorithm of complementarity based on the richness of aquatic Coleoptera was applied. 'Complementarity' refers to the degree to which an area, or set of areas, contributes otherwise unrepresented attributes to a set of areas. This principle was used to maximize the number of species represented within a given number of areas.