Dear Forumers,
My name is Márton Szabolcs, I am an assistant research fellow in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In the last couple of years I have worked in the Balkan Peninsula, mostly in Albania to update the knowledge on the distribution of amphibians and reptiles living there and I participated in fieldwork related to the Greek meadow viper in Albania and Greece.
Now I am working on a project called Balkan Herps. It is kind of a citizen science project, where everybody can upload their occurence records of amphibians and reptiles from the Balkan Peninsula. I write here because I would like to ask the Fieldherping forum community to send data to the project.
The main objective of the project is to investigate the relationship between amphibian and reptile species ranges, diversity and protected areas (PA). We would like to assess the efficiency of the existing PA network and detect needs for PA designation. The project is led by me, Edvárd Mizsei from the University of Debrecen, Hungary and Daniel Jablonski from the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia.
In the beginning we will create species distribution models (SDM) based on occurrence records. We would like to use the biomod2 method in R which is the most advanced tool in SDM. After this we will use the systematic conservation planning tool Zonation to investigate the relationship between SDMs and PAs and to reveal unprotected but important areas. This is especially significant in candidate countries of the European Union where new NATURA 2000 areas will be created and this study can be an important baseline in the process. As the Balkan Peninsula is highly diverse in amphibians and reptiles we believe this project is very important for the effective conservation of them.
We created an online platform called Balkan Herps (http://openbiomaps.org/projects/balkanherps/) where we already have more than 12000 records from all of the Balkan countries. The database is not available for visitors and registered members only see their own records. Unregistered people only see dots in a map, but not what they mean. The database is not going to be published and we will treat it as confidential. However, in the publication’s supplementary we will attach the species distribution model maps with the training and testing localities, which will contain only 20-30 % of the original records after a spatially balanced resampling of the database. Published data should be uploaded as well, but in this case please add the reference in the “source” column. We created a short video on how to use the platform: https://youtu.be/qsu-0UeC46g
If you have any questions about the project and want to know more please write me an email to szabolcs.marci gmail.
Thanks for reading and best wishes,
Márton Szabolcs