Across-Country Analyses of Biodiversity Congruence and Current Conservation Effort in the Tropics

In identifying priorities for conservation action, it is critically important to assess how much current conservation initiatives are targeted toward key sites for biodiversity. Such analyses are greatly hampered, however, by lack of information about biological richness and existing conservation effort. We tried to address this problem by using data on one well-known indicator group and by focusing solely on an international scale, which is the only level at which global information on certain aspects of conservation effort is so far available. Building on the results of a project that mapped the distribution of all bird species with breeding ranges of less than 50.000 km2, we found that the number of these restricted-range birds in tropical countries was a useful predictor of national levels of endemism and, to a lesser extent, species richness and threat in other animal and plant groups. The relationships usually persisted after removing the effects of country area, confirming the utility of restricted-range birds as biodiversity indicators. When we then compared national scores for restricted-range bird species with measures of current conservation effort, we found that the extent of both protected areas and foreign funding for biodiversity conservation and research increased with this index of a country's biological value. Thus, conservation efforts are generally greater in tropical countries with large numbers of restricted-range birds. These results should be interpreted cautiously. When we controlled for area effects, although mean biodiversity spending per unit area of a country increased with area-adjusted importance for restricted-range birds, the percentage of a country covered by protected areas did not increase. Moreover, our indices of effort and biological richness are clearly limited in scope, quality, and resolution. Most important, the relationships between overall current effort and biological value are weak, and there are many ornithologically rich countries that receive relatively little conservation attention. These nations are in many cases important priorities for additional conservation action.