Freshwater Assessments in Developing Country Contexts: Innovations and Opportunities

The world's developed nations have hosted the lion's share of freshwater conservation assessments, yet developing nations are home to a disproportionately large fraction of global freshwater biodiversity. With less `hard-path' infrastructure in place, opportunities for proactive freshwater conservation abound, but economic growth pressures do as well. The need for freshwater assessments is urgent in these environments, but assessment approaches and outcomes can exhibit important differences from those in developed country contexts. First, the need to balance biodiversity conservation with economic development interests is a common and strong undercurrent and translates to an elevated focus on freshwater ecosystem goods and services over pure existence values. Second, data gaps about species, habitats, and processes can be so extensive as to nearly engender paralysis. Assessment methodologies created for data-rich situations often transfer imperfectly to these environments, and planners must find creative ways of circumventing data gaps without sacrificing scientific robustness. In some cases, this need has catalyzed technological `leapfrogging,' with advanced tools developed expressly to address these gaps. Here we present examples of these innovations as applied in South America, with a focus on the use of habitat classifications and threat analyses based on models and geospatial data.