Updated Listings of Fauna and Flora Species - caftadr-environment ...

UPDATED LISTINGS OF FLORA AND FAUNA SPECIESINCLUDED IN THE CITES APPENDICES DISTRIBUTED IN CENTRAL AMERICA AND DOMINICAN REPUBLICMethodologyThe information on CITES species listings for Central America and the Dominican Republic was created based on thecompilation of information on plants and animals contained in the following documents:1. “Taxonomic Update and CITES Plant Species Distribution in Central America and the Dominican Republic”, a productdeveloped in 2007 by the consulting firm Asesorías Ambientales VIMU-GAIA-EON SRL (VIGAE SRL) for theNational Institute of Biodiversity (INBio) with financial support from the Government of Norway, as part ofthe project “Building capacities and Sharing Technology for Biodiversity Management in Central America”, thatincludes nearly one million plant specimen entries collected in the region and the Dominican Republic.2. “Review and Update of CITES Fauna Listings of DR-CAFTA Countries”, a consultancy conducted during the2008-2009 period by the Regional Institute of Biodiversity (IRBio) for the Central American Commission ofEnvironment and Development (CCAD), with financial support from the US Government, as part of USAID-CCAD Cooperative Agreement. This information was validated through national workshops involving specialistson different fauna taxa from each country. Given that is the consultancy was completed through the DR-CAFTAFree Trade Agreement, listings from Belize and Panama were not included.Both documents are included in digital format in a CD-ROM attached to this publication, thus the methodologydeveloped for each of those investigations is included in the attached documentation.For the development of the document “UPDATED LISTINGS OF FAUNA AND FLORA SPECIES INCLUDED INCITES APPENDICES AND DISTRIBUTED IN CENTRAL AMERICA AND DOMINICAN REPUBLIC”, listingswere reviewed in order to verify that they contained the updated information. Considering that Belize and Panama werenot included here, the updating process of these lists was conducted in this phase for both countries, with the intentionof having complete regional listings for both taxa.The review was performed by obtaining the general listings from the database managed by the World ConservationMonitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC) as a primary source, as well as the CITES Species Annoted Listing (CITES2008) generated by the CITES Secretariat, and a review of various other types of material that included information onCITES plant and animal species in the countries of the Central American region and the Dominican Republic.Below is the detailed methodology for each aspect considered in this project:1. Obtention of CITES listings and national listings of CITES SpeciesConducted a search of the official websites of each country, as well as that of the UNEP-WCMC.; Searched theCITES annotated listings; completed a literature review, and made inquiries to the Administrative Authorities fromeach country, in order to verify the information contained in the lists in collaboration with professionals from theregion. Through this process, created a database of the species that have to be included in the Appendices.Upon obtention of these databases, conducted a review of each of the species included in the Appendices, verifying thatevery one of them was included in the listings. As previously mentioned, UNEP-WCMC listings do not include all thespecies of the region, so the verification of which species were included and which were not was of great importance.The species not included were then added and the following data was reviewed: phyllum, class, order, family, genus,species, synonyms, distribution range, authors, years, orthography, and common names, among others, supported bylistings provided by the countries and by reviews made by several specialists from the countries, which facilitated theinclusion of species.These base listings and the literature review allowed the creation and review of annotated listings included in thisdocument. In the work completed for fauna (IRBio 2009), the inclusion of Panama and Belize was not considered,and for that reason these two countries were included in this review, starting the process with the database provided byUNEP–WCMC, the CITES Appendices, and the literature review, as well as enquiries made to specialists from thesecountries, as suggested by CITES Authorities.2. FLORA ResearchIn the flora listing, each species obtained from the previous database was cross-verified on the database of W3TROPICOS(http://www.tropicos.org/) from the Missouri Botanical Garden, in addition to a review of the Central AmericanHerbariums website (http://ceiba.inbio.ac.cr/pres/PresentationServlet?action=home), where entries by each countrywere obtained for families such as: Orchidaceae, Cactaceae, and Cyathaceae, from the following sources: El Salvador,a database from the Herbarium of the Natural History Museum of El Salvador (MUHNES); Guatemala, the databasefrom the Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT); Honduras, the MOBOT database and the Paul C. Standley Herbariumdatabase from the “El Zamorano” Panamerican Agriculture School (EHPZ); for Nicaragua, the Miguel Ramirez GoyenaHerbarium database from the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua in León (HULE); Panama, the MOBOTdatabase and the Smithsonian Institution (SCZ) Herbarium database; and for Costa Rica, the INBio database (CR-INBIO) and the National Herbarium (MN-CR) database, at the National Museum. For the Dominican Republic,the information was obtained from the Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat website and from a site whereendangered species are listed for the Orchidaceae and Cactaceae families (Marcano 2007). With this information, thequantity of species was increased and the species were verified primarily for these families.Specialists from Panama, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic provided input on the observations made to the2007 work, and other specialists also supported the review with their observations and book recommendations. Panamain particular requested that the work be based on the research of Correa et al. 2004, and Honduras, which requested thework be guided by the research of C. Nelson 2008, a request that led to more complete listings.Orchidaceae and Cactaceae required further investigation, given that the complete family is included. Reservationsremain with regard to the orchids listing, given that this is one of the groups on which more work has been done, andthere have been constant changes in nomenclature; therefore there is no certainty about which belong to the samespecies, and many are accepted under three different names, all of them included in the listings. Another interestingaspect revealed by the investigation was that several countries of the region still use names which are no longer acceptedorare not current, making it difficult to identify the species. Consequently, the orchid group section is an annotated listof species and by no means is a systematic review or a nomenclature work.Since trade regulation of tree ferns is important, they were included only as Cyathea spp. and Dicksonia spp., althoughsome may currently have a different nomenclature.Another important aspect that needs to be emphasized is that non-native species may be ocassionally found in a countrylisting, but they are included because they are species that were introduced and are now grown and traded from CentralAmerican and Dominican Republic.1415