ATBC 2008 - Bernard

Symposium

Site level conservation targets in high-biodiversity wilderness areas: progress with key biodiversity identification

Organizer : Curtis Bernard (Cbernard -at- conservation.org)

Given that the primary threat to biodiversity is the destruction of natural habitats, the foremost conservation response must be to protect the places where threatened biodiversity is found. Indeed, the establishment of protected areas has long been a cornerstone of conservation, with a specific mandate from the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Programme of Work on Protected Areas. However, this raises the question of how to identify places as targets for such site level conservation. More then two decades ago, techniques for the identification of important bird areas were developed to address this question, based on ‘vulnerability’ and ‘irreplaceability’, the core principles of systematic conservation planning. Over the last decade, as comprehensive assessments of biodiversity beyond birds have become available, these techniques have been generalized to facilitate the identification of key biodiversity areas as targets for site conservation.

The identification of key biodiversity areas in tropical wilderness areas presents a number of specific challenges. First and foremost, the low sampling intensity of biodiversity through the wilderness areas means that biological data are sparse and biased. Moreover, the biophysical homogeneity and lack of formal land management structures in many regions means that the delineation of site conservation targets present particular difficulties. Nevertheless, work on the identification of key biodiversity areas in regions such as the Guianas, the Amazon, the Congo, and New Guinea has been proceeding apace for five years now. This has been facilitated by the recognition that the spatial extent of “sites” in such wilderness regions can be much larger than traditionally conceived elsewhere in the world, a scale of conservation to which the recent establishment of the 4.25m ha Grão-Pará Ecological Station in Pará, Brazil, bears testament. This symposium proposes to review and draw comparative lessons from this work around the world’s high-biodiversity wilderness areas.

SPONSORSHIPS

Conservation International