Distribución Espacial de la Biodiversidad en el Estado de San Luis Potosí, México

Abstract

As demonstrated by several assessment studies carried out during the first decade of the 21st-century, Mexico still holds a very significant biological wealth. However, this ecological richness is at risk of being lost due to an accelerated rate of natural resource use, a fast-growing rural and urban population, a weak legal protection provided by Mexican environmental legislation, and a still quite inaccurate knowledge of biodiversity from a spatial standpoint, a problem that is specifically addressed in this paper. It thus proposes a new methodology to reveal, from a cartographic perspective, the biological richness of San Luis Potosí State, based on a synthetic weighing of a set of biotic and abiotic variables. This methodological proposal and the results depicted here show how this cartographic tool can be fruitfully used to design strategies for natural resource conservation and local development.