Case Study
Submitted By
| Name: | Patricia Escalante |
| Institution: | Instituto de Biologia UNAM |
| Country: | Mexico |
| Email: | tilmatura@ibiologia.unam.mx |
Title & Categories
| Case Study Title: | The DNA Barcode of Mesoamerican Birds |
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Scope
The Mesoamerican Region for this study includes Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Mexico shares much of its avifauna with these centroamerican countries, and less with the rest of Centroamerica (Costa Rica and Panama) due to the natural barrier of Lake Nicaragua. There have been no barcoding effort for the birds of this region, although some species are shared with the United States and Canada.
The breeding avifauna of this region is composed of 878 resident species, 198 migratory or wintering species, 16 sea-faring birds, and 44 of accidental occurrence.
In addition to the scientific importance of the project, groups of birds in this region are subject to heavy population pressures because of the pet trade (parrots, raptos, song birds), and there is also interest to have a more reliable identification system for waterfowl and migratory birds in the field of wildlife diseases and their disemination. A well establish taxonomy will be of importance to conservation.
Purpose
The purpose of this project is to sample 5-10 individuals of each breeding species preferably from separate populations of its range to establish the COI sequence of the species; and to produce preliminary information about the species geographic differentiation in order to detect possible within-species differentiation for further investigation.
In addition the purpose is to contribute to the ABBI campaign of the BOL Initiative, and later on to participate in regional analysis for the avifauna and species groups.Background
The collection that has more samples or specimens available for this project is the Colección Nacional de Aves at Instituto de Biología UNAM (CNAV), but other collections are invited to participate if they are interested.
The CNAV at the moment has 586 (66 %) resident species represented by frozen tissues with vouchers, or skins less that 30 years old. Most of the species have several populations sampled, but others are represented by only one specimen.