El estudio de la biodiversidad en México: ¿una ruta con dirección?

Abstract

Mexico is a country with an extraordinary natural wealth; however, after 2 centuries of taxonomic work only a fraction of the total number of species that occur in the country is known. A major problem is that we are loosing this enormous biological wealth with increasing extinction rates that are now orders of magnitude larger than the natural rates. This supplement was edited considering that the continuous monitoring of Mexican biodiversity can be a useful tool to evaluate the balance between what we know and what we ignore about the number of species, and that the ongoing analysis could help directing future studies. Far from including all possible taxa, an analysis is presented of 56 biological groups that account for 94 412 species in Mexico which represent 8.59% of the world’s total for those groups, with an average endemism of 39.7%. It is estimated from the data here published that Mexico’s biota could be, on average, 3.3 times larger than what is now known.