A conservation planning study in Papua New Guinea (PNG) addresses the role of
biodiversity surrogates and biodiversity targets, in the context of the trade-offs required
for planning given real-world costs and constraints. In a trade-offs framework, surrogates
must be judged in terms of their success in predicting general biodiversity
complementarity values – the amount of additional biodiversity an area can contribute to
a protected set. Wrong predictions of low complementarity (and consequent allocation of
The ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) Version 3 (ASTGTM) provides a global digital elevation model (DEM) of land areas on Earth at a spatial resolution of 1 arc second (approximately 30 meter horizontal posting at the equator).
The development of the ASTER GDEM data products is a collaborative effort between National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI). The ASTER GDEM data products are created by the Sensor Information Laboratory Corporation (SILC) in Tokyo.
AquaMaps are computer-generated predictions of natural occurrence of marine species, based on the environmental tolerance of a given species with respect to depth, salinity, temperature, primary productivity, and its association with sea ice or coastal areas. These 'environmental envelopes' are matched against an authority file which contains respective information for the Oceans of the World. Independent knowledge such as distribution by FAO areas or bounding boxes are used to avoid mapping species in areas that contain suitable habitat, but are not occupied by the species.