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Birds Conservation in Latin America

 

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The web pages shown in the table of contents to the upper left of this page presents the results of a 2-year collaboration (1998-1999) among The Nature Conservancy, the University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, and a host of other partners. Priority areas for conservation of bird species at risk in Latin America were identified using the criterion of density of "at risk" species, or species richness. The project was lead by Drs Tom Brooks (now with Conservation International), Kimberly Smith (UA Biological Sciences) and Fred Limp. 

Species Richness Bird / Human Population Density Comparison Birds at Risk, Ecuador

Project Overview

Humanity’s impact is causing an extinction crisis in which species are being lost at a rate 100 times faster than that usual in the geological past (Pimm et al. 1995). High rates of habitat destruction worldwide suggest this, and assessment of the status of individual species confirms it (Brooks et al. 1997). For birds, the best known of all biological groups, no less than 11% of the world’s species are considered globally threatened with "a high probability of extinction in the medium term future" (Collar et al. 1994). Latin America alone, covering only 16% of the world’s land area, holds 30% of all threatened birds (Collar et al. 1997).

It is increasingly clear that this crisis is not uniform: both biological diversity and humanity’s impacts upon it are geographically clustered into ‘hotspots’, especially in the tropics (Myers 1988). Thus, the conservation of species one-by-one is inefficient (Pitelka 1981). In response, conservation biologists are beginning to address ways in which multiple species can be conserved simultaneously, rather than individually (Ehrlich 1992). Two possible approaches include protecting distinct biogeographic zones (Diamond 1986) and concentrations of species with small ranges (Terbough and Winter 1983). Most directly, concentrations of threatened species can be mapped by ‘site-specific synthesis’ (Collar 1994) to show hotspots of, for example, the taxa covered by the US Endangered Species Act (Dobson et al. 1997). Overlaying further information showing where conservation is already underway will then produce a map which pinpoints the ‘gaps’ in current conservation effort (Kepler and Scott 1985).

Powerful computing technology has allowed such priority-setting to move ‘beyond opportunism’ with three key principles for the iterative selection of efficient conservation areas: complimentarity, flexibility and irreplaceability (Pressey et al. 1994). These principles are now being widely applied (Pimm and Lawton 1998). A potentially major constraint is that most biodiversity remains unknown (May 1988). Systematic priority-setting must therefore rely on samples of well-known taxa (Reid 1998), between which there appears to be little congruence in hotspots of richness (van Jaarsveld et al. 1998) especially at the finest scales (Lawton et al. 1998). However recent work suggests that there is in fact high congruence for complimentary hotspots both between taxa (Howard et al. 1998) and between taxonomic levels (Balmford et al. 1996), and thus that the iterative selection of conservation areas for well-known taxa is an effective strategy to preserve biodiversity as a whole (Balmford 1998).

This project aims to apply these techniques to determine conservation priorities, based on the distribution of birds considered at risk, in Latin America.