The Multifaceted Nature of Biodiversity Conservation: Reply to Leroux and Schmiegelow

Abstract

Leroux and Schmiegelow raise several key issues about our paper (Lamoreux et al. 2006) regarding global tests of concordance for species richness and endemism and their implications for conservation. Although we differ with Leroux and Schmiegelow over the importance of endemism, we agree with enough of their comments that we are left to wonder why these were offered as a critique of our work.Leroux and Schmiegelow partition our global data set of terrestrial vertebrates into three categories of overall richness and find that, within each category, the richness of the groups shows little overlap. They conclude that "partitioning the data into richness categories seriously challenges the notion that a given vertebrate class can be used reliably as a surrogate for others."Although Leroux and Schmiegelow provide this analysis as a challenge to our work, we agree with their result: global correlations, especially those of richness, are of little practical use for conservation. And we said as much in the paper: "Global conservation priorities based on richness alone will overlook many endemic species." We also noted that "although global correlations are suggestive of concordant diversity patterns, the question most relevant to conservation decisions is whether a specific set of ecoregions selected for one measure will represent nontarget species (Balmford 1998;Howard et al. 1998;Moore et al. 2003)."In our paper we addressed this question by selecting ecoregions based on the number of endemics they contain and asking how many total species are also repre- †

Ecoregion Prioritization Suggests an Armoury Not a Silver Bullet for Conservation Planning

“…All major institutional approaches to global biodiversity conservation prioritization operate on such an “irreplaceability/vulnerability” framework and aim for the protection of rare and endangered species rather than overall species diversity as the leading paradigm [7] . This may be because endemics have restricted distributions, often smaller populations, and thus greater vulnerability to extinction [7] , [10] , [11] , whereas species richness is mainly driven by widespread and non-endangered organisms. Therefore, global conservation priorities based on richness alone have not been implemented [7] , [10] , [11] and are even regarded as of little practical use for conservation [11] .…”

“…This may be because endemics have restricted distributions, often smaller populations, and thus greater vulnerability to extinction [7] , [10] , [11] , whereas species richness is mainly driven by widespread and non-endangered organisms. Therefore, global conservation priorities based on richness alone have not been implemented [7] , [10] , [11] and are even regarded as of little practical use for conservation [11] .…”