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Project Methodology

 

Other Birds Conservation in Latin America areas:

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Preparing the list of birds at risk

    By combining the lists of all rare Latin American species from the summary Red List (Collar et al. 1994), the Parker et al. (1996) databases, and TNC’s Heritage Program rankings (TNC 1998) we were able to compile an inclusive list all birds considered at risk by one or more organizations. This list requires review by the project committee to remove any taxonomic or geographic bias. We subdivided the list into an a-list of species considered by all three sources and a b-list of species considered by only one or two.

    Collar et al. (1994) is the most exclusive list, covering only those species threatened "with a high probability of extinction in the medium-term future" (subdivided into ‘critical’, ‘endangered’ and ‘vulnerable’) plus those for which too little data exist for evaluation (‘data deficient’), those "close to qualifying for the threatened categories" (‘near-threatened’), those that are ‘extinct in the wild’ and those that are ‘conservation dependent’ (no species in this last category occur in Latin America). This summary Red List is an update of the comprehensive Red Data Book (Collar et al. 1992). Collar et al. (1994) list a total of 564 continental Latin American landbirds (295 threatened, 1 extinct in the wild, 6 data deficient, and 262 near-threatened).

    Parker et al. (1996) rank all Latin American species with conservation priorities of ‘urgent’ (CP-1), ‘high’ (CP-2), ‘medium’ (CP-3), or ‘low’ (CP-4). We consider all of their CP-1 through CP-3 species to be at risk, a total of 976 continental landbirds.

    TNC’s Heritage Program (Master 1991) ranks species as ‘critically imperiled’ (G1), ‘imperiled’ (G2), ‘rare or uncommon’ (G3), ‘apparantly secure’ (G4), and ‘widespread, abundant, and secure’ (G5), with borderline species denoted by two ranks. The application of these ranks to Latin American birds was carried out by S. Hilty and D. Stotz, who considered a total of 1,248 continental landbirds to fall into the ranks G1 through G3G4 and so be at risk (TNC 1998).

    We restricted the species considered to those of continental Latin America, i.e., from Mexico southwards, including near-shore islands (e.g., Trinidad and Tobago and Cozumel) but excluding the oceanic islands of the Caribbean and Pacific, because conservation on islands requires that priorities are set at a much smaller scale than relevant for continents.

    Similarly, we excluded all waterbird orders (Sphenisciformes, Podicipediformes, Procellariiformes, Pelecaniformes, Ciconiiformes, Phoenicopteriformes, Anseriformes and Charadriiformes) as again these demand very different scales and scopes of conservation from landbirds. In addition, their ranges are often impossible to represent on continuous distribution maps (Scott et al. 1993). We did include Gruiformes as the Latin American species—mainly rails—are more or less terrestrial.

    We excluded species that migrate from the Nearctic as conservation priorities for these have already been amply documented elsewhere, and as their conservation needs are rather different to those of resident birds (e.g., Roca et al. 1996). For austral migrants—species that migrate within the Neotropics (as which we include Dendroica chrysoparia, because ite breeding range is so close to our region)—we included both breeding and wintering ranges (Gómez de Silva Garza 1996).

    The taxonomy of Neotropical birds is in a state of flux with constant changes brought about by the discovery of new species and the revision of old taxa. To reflect this dynamism we do not follow any one taxonomic source, but rather aim to include taxa considered full species by prevailing opinion, citing explicit references for deviation in treatment from Collar et al. (1994) and Parker et al. (1996).