Gap Analysis for Mexico: An Emerging Program

Vincent Burke¹ and Carlos Gonzalez-Rebeles²

¹School of Natural Resources, University of Missouri, Columbia

²Institute of Ecology, University of Mexico, Mexico City

Efforts to extend GAP within North America have been ongoing since 1995, but fiscal realities and difficulties in designating personnel to oversee the effort delayed concentrated efforts until late in 1996. Since 1996 a number of sources have contributed to the establishment of a "Mexican GAP." Cash and in-kind contributions for field and laboratory work were provided through the following combination of sources: The Mexican Agency CONABIO (Comision Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad en Mexico - Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity in Mexico); the Director’s Contingency Fund of the National Biological Service (funded in 1996); the Inventory and Monitoring Program of NBS (funded in 1996); USGS-BRD Gap Analysis Program, University of Missouri Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Texas Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, the Institute of Ecology at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and the Autonomous Mexican State Universities of Chihuahua and Coahuila.

After field visits by personnel from Texas Tech University, field work for the U.S.-Mexico International Gap Project began during fall of 1998. The project is concentrated in regions adjacent to Texas in the Mexican states of Coahuila and Chihuahua. A schedule of progress for the first phase of Mexican GAP was set during a recent meeting in Chihuahua as follows:

Deliverable (Completion) Dates

Some of the difficulties facing a GAP project in Mexico include the lack of a database on plant assemblages, the sparsity of vertebrate distribution records for some areas, and the different types of land-management categories (e.g., "ejidos" or communal lands). Mexico also presents a variety of opportunities related to gap analysis, such as the presence of strong field-oriented botanists at state universities, the existence of a national biodiversity database administered by CONABIO, lower costs of labor, and opportunities for funding from international development agencies (e.g., World Bank, IADB, CEC, AID).

Mexico, however, presents a unique opportunity for partnership with GAP efforts in the U.S. It possesses extremely high biodiversity and, as in the U.S., there are many pressures on its native species. Forming a partnership with Mexico will not only help address regional biodiversity issues that affect the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas but will also allow GAP to begin addressing problems that require international cooperation.

Over time, we anticipate that the fundamentals of the GAP approach are so strong it cannot help but spread to neighboring countries and beyond. Indeed, efforts are currently under way to establish a GAP-type effort in Canada as well as Mexico. Given the vast resource of experiences in the U.S. and the impending edge-matching of the states, we are confident that the next decade will see the production of biodiversity maps that are continental in scale.