Case Studies:
BERDS is not only a comprehensive environmental data repository but also a suite of accessible and easy to use tools which can aide in scientific research and the investigation of conservation issues of national and regional concern.
The BERDS geodatabase enables students and researchers, both local and abroad, to investigate patterns and explore species-area relationships in a geospatial context. This allows the user to look at species abundance, species distributions and even potential biogeographic affinities between species (e.g. butterflies and their host plants, fishes and their headwaters, etc).
Likewise, users are able to routinely monitor a variety of parameters; of particular interest to management agencies is the ability to monitor species abundance over time, seasonal fire data or look for country-wide indications of potential agricultural encroachment on protected areas and proposed biological corridors. BERDS contains 101,219 specimen records (and growing daily), maintains over 30 thematic layers of the latest spatial data for Belize and generates monthly fire data from NASA's GEOS satellite imagery for such purposes.
The BERDS system could prove useful to agencies such as the Forest Department, the National Institute of Culture and History, and Programme for Belize in their efforts to better monitor the lands under their stewardship. For example, such data could be used to aide the Forest Department in its efforts to better investigate potential encroachment on protected lands. This system also lends itself to looking across larger time spans to corroborate suspected patterns of encroachment, perturbation and ecosystem change. And this data is freely accessible with just a few clicks on BERDS.
The case studies below are step-by-step research examples of how a user can glean important and timely information from the BERDS system to actively investigate research and monitoring questions.
Also see the BERDS tutorials.
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