Conservation priorities for birds and biodiversity: do East African Important Bird Areas represent species diversity in other terrestrial vertebrate groups?

An urgent question in biodiversity conservation is the extent to which prio rity areas for one well-known indicator group, like birds, "capture" specie s within other groups. The first tests of this question have indicated that capture is high. BirdLife International's "Important Bird Areas" (IBAs) wo rk on this assumption. We test this for East African IBAs using databases o n the distribution of all Afrotropical birds, mammals, snakes and amphibian s, compiled at the Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen and ma pped on a I-degree grid in the software WORLDMAP, We assess how well the IB As capture terrestrial vertebrate species in the region, and find that abso lute capture is high. Moreover, capture of regionally endemic and threatene d species is also very high. We indicate those few important species and ar eas not covered by IBAs. However, the IBAs do not generally capture other g roups significantly better than do random sets of areas covering the same e xtent. Further, systematically selected near-minimum sets of areas can capt ure more species in considerably less area. Nevertheless, these near-minimu m sets take into account neither ecological processes (in particular, avian migration) nor actual land-use patterns. As data become available to incor porate these factors and other taxa into quantitative priority-setting tech niques, IBAs may be able to be planned with added area-efficiency. For now, though,we suggest that IBAs are not only very effective on-the-ground prio rities for the conservation of birds but they also represent the majority o f other terrestrial vertebrate diversity.