This award enables a broad-based, multiple-investigator survey of insect and arachnid biodiversity in southern South America. The arthropod fauna of Chile and Argentina requires this immediate and detailed attention for at least three reasons. First, just as with the rain forests of much of the New World tropics, south temperate forests are currently being destroyed at an alarming rate, and the fauna must be sampled, rapidly and exhaustively, while such studies are still possible. Second, the fauna includes many taxa of special phylogenetic significance; the most primitive members of many taxa are already known to be endemic to the area. And third, the fauna is of special significance to biogeographers, for whom the interrelationships of south temperate biotas in general have constituted a major focus of interest and effort for over a century. The survey will allow accurate identification of the smallest areas of endemism within Chile and Argentina, and thereby help separate those forests which need to be maintained in as pristine a state as possible from those which can best be used as sustainable resources without endangering unique elements of the biota. The award will fund one graduate student and two postdoctoral fellows as well about 118 person-weeks of field work.
