French Version
Many appraisals or assessments on biodiversity require an up to date comprehensive knowledge of the range of species. Moreover, species lists of administrative (more on http://inpn.mnhn.fr/accueil/recherche-de-donnees/coll-terr) reference may be useful to develop conservation policies of species in such administrative levels or in higher levels.
The Museum manages these two levels of knowledge within the framework of an atlas of species per department. The department is in fact a relevant administrative entity which has the advantage of being a rather thin inventory unit to provide an acceptable level of biogeographical information on species distribution but requires an effort on data acquisition sufficiently reduced to consider frequent updates.
By extension, the marine environment has been divided into marine areas that partly follows terrestrial departments. A "department" is therefore an administrative department (metropole and overseas), an overseas collectivity or a marine sector.
The summary information presented on these cards can be based on expert opinion (likely presence or absence of the species). However, these opinions rely on at least one observation validated recently regarding the proven presence of the species. An innovative aspect lies in the estimation of absence of the species clearly differentiated from a simple lack of information.
This Atlas will prevail over any national inventory, more discriminating and more instructive. This approach has the advantage of establishing a synthetic distribution for poorly known groups. It is a starting point to initiate national inventories and these distributions are used to easily detect outliers.
