Funcionamiento ecosistémico y evaluación de prioridades geográficas en conservación

This article shows the potential of remote sensing techniques, based on the descriptions of ecosystem functional attributes, to solve classical questions of conservation biology. We present an analysis aimed to evaluate how the protected area networks in two countries, Spain and Uruguay, represent the national ecosystems diversity. First, we identified the functional space (continuum approach) of natural vegetation in each country, using two functional attributes derived from vegetation indices (VI), mean VI (VI-I) and relative range (RREL). The VI-I is an estimator of the fraction of photosynthetic active radiation absorbed by the canopy, and the RREL is a surrogate of the seasonality of radiation interception. The functional space defined in this way constitutes a rapid way to describe the whole ecosystems variability within a region. Moreover, it allows the evaluation of the representation of the network, as the used variables are related to ecosystems ’ response to the regional environmental gradient. Thus, this methodology identifies not only the common and singular protected areas in each country, but also the gaps in the network, and how redundant or complementary are the protected areas in the national context of ecosystem functioning.