Page 176 - Mapping the Nation: Taking Climate Action

175 The world's last known male northern white rhinoceros died in Kenya on March 19, 2018. Since his early work in the 1990s, global maps of species distribution have expanded to mammals, amphibians, plants, invertebrates, and marine life. Putting this work into a shared map for collaborative science is now Jetz's passion, to avoid duplication of effort and to pool efforts to arrive at a scientifically rigorous yet actionable knowledge base. "Alexander von Humboldt was the first to draw some of these maps and gradients 250 years ago," Jetz said. "Now it's possible to take that into the quantitative scientific realm and to think not just about single species but to make the link to patterns of communities and the conservation relevance of places." Ecoinformatics to Measure Change Increasing volumes of data are helping underpin spatial decision-making to protect species at the local, regional, national, and global scale.