Flagship species, ecological complementarity and conserving the diversity of mammals and birds in sub-Saharan Africa

More biodiversity could be protected in situ if the few species that attrac t the most popular support (the 'flagship' species) had distributions that also covered the broader diversity of organisms. We studied how well differ ent groups of mammals performed for representing the diversity of mammals a nd breeding birds among 1 degrees areas of sub-Saharan Africa. We demonstra te that choosing areas of sub-Saharan Africa using either conservationists' six primary flagship mammals, or the six 'Big Five' mammals popular with w ildlife tourists, is not significantly better for representing the diversit y of mammals and birds than choosing areas at random. Furthermore, neither of these groups is significantly better for representing the diversity of m ammals and birds than groups of the same number of species chosen at random . We show that in order to succeed in representing many mammals and birds i n area selection, it is not sufficient for the groups used for selection to occur in many different ecoregions, they must also have low overlaps in di stribution, so as to provide high ecological complementarity (a similar pat tern of ecological complementarity must be shared by the larger group of sp ecies to be represented). Therefore there may be a need for an explicit pol icy to balance the requirements of flagship conservation and broader biodiv ersity conservation, which will have implications for the distribution of r esources.