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South-east Asia

The analysis of IPAs in the Indochina floristic region will be conducted as part of a project supported by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund from 2009-2012.

In addition to the main objective to assess the distribution and status of globally threatened plant species using IUCN criteria, the project will identify the most valuable sites of plant diversity in the Indochina region as the basis for prioritising conservation actions.

Information on plant diversity is fragmentary, hence poorly represented in conservation planning, management, monitoring, and decision-making. The challenge of using plants as indicator groups in biodiversity assessment is the lack of knowledge on the biology, ecology, and distribution of plant species, many of which remain un-described. The botanical data that do exist remain inaccessible to decision-makers because these data reside only in the herbarium specimens and the scientific and grey literature written in different languages.

The project will therefore train local scientists to assemble the botanical information into a database and to combine the plant distributional data with the ecological data and other parameters in a GIS map to identify the important plant areas (IPAs) for conservation. Until now, conservation planning in the region has relied largely on the opinions of experts and on the use of data on few indicator groups such as birds and large mammals.

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