NATIONAL POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL

PETROLEUM ENGINEERING
GIS
NAME: PAOLO ANDREE MACIAS
DATE: 07 06 2016

PRIORITIES CONSERVATION OF THREATENED MAMMALS IN COUNTRIES WITH HIGH

LEVELS OF GAS EMISSIONS
OBJECTIVES
Determine the conservation priority of mammals in countries that are affected by gas
emissions, and considering the overall number of species who live in each country.
Determine which countries in America have the most gas emission percent.
Determine which countries have the most number of threatened species of mammals
in South America and Central America.
METHODOLOGY
Once we have loaded the layers that were working on (species_neotropics.shp,
statistics_neotropics.shp, boundaries_neotropics.shp), we start to analyze the data, for which
we have to delete all the negative values (under 0) from the attribute table.
First of all, we take the layer called statistics_neotropics.shp and we proceed to work with the
data GGAS_EMS98, which is the gas emission for country in 1998, and then we organize this
data so we can visualize the map in a more graduate way, as we have learned in class.
Then we work with the layer called species_neotropics.shp, and this time we use the data
MAMSP_THR which are the species of mammals that are threatened in each country. We
represent this data as we did in the previous step.
Using again the layer species_neotropics.shp, we proceed now to normalize the data by using
the followings: MAMSP_THR and MAMSP_NO, this means that now the visualization of the map
will give a better look of the threatened species vs the overall number in each country.
Finally, we represent all the three maps using the impression tool that QGIS has.
RESULTS
As we could see in the first graphic, bigger countries produce more gas emissions tan the smaller
ones, this can be related to the extension of their urban area, on the other hand, the second
map shows us that these same countries have a big number of threatened species, which now
we can relate to the huge gas emissions that these countries produce.
These gas emissions are destroying the natural habitat of the many mammal species that live in
this big countries.
Finally, the last map gives us a better look of the real problem, the bigger countries indeed have
a lot of mammals threatened but this number is really small compare to the overall number of
mammals that live in the area, which leads us to take a good focus on countries like Cuba, they
may have a few number of threatened mammals compare to countries like Brazil and Argentina,
but this number is really to the overall number of species in Cuba, that means that the mammals
are endangered in this area.
The results are shown in the following maps: