Toward a Blueprint for Conservation in Africa

Biogeographical patterns of endemic terrestrial Afrotropical birds

“…Udvardy, 1975;Emanuel et al, 1992;Turpie & Crowe, 1994;Turpie, 1995;Olson & Dinerstein, 1998). Setting conservation priorities for Afrotropical birds is additionally complicated by the lack of co-occurrence of narrow endemics (for example in the Ethiopian Highlands), such that many areas will be required to adequately represent narrow endemics (see Brooks et al, 2001). The low coincidence of peaks narrow of endemism with peaks of species richness, means that it is often not possible to identify areas that simultaneously cater for rare species as well as many widespread ones.…”

Global tests of biodiversity concordance and the importance of endemism

“…Vertebrates, being relatively well-known, are frequently used to represent all biodiversity, but analyses of cross-taxa congruence often show little overlap [5][6][7] and have thus lowered confidence in the use of surrogates. This lack of concordance could be a consequence of limitations in the taxonomic breadth or geographic extent of previous studies [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] .…”

“…For this reason, many studies have tested the performance of terrestrial vertebrates as surrogates for overall species diversity, but these tests have typically been limited to a single taxon or region [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] . Here we show that global patterns of richness are highly correlated among amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, as are endemism patterns.…”

“…Richness is perhaps the most common measure of species diversity because it is relatively easy to compile and it implies that large numbers of species can be conserved in small areas 1,9,13 . We calculated the correlation between the proportional richness corrected for ecoregion area (hereafter termed 'richness'; see Methods) of each class and the other vertebrates (an index combining the three remaining classes).…”

Causes of habitat loss in a Neotropical landscape: The Panama Canal corridor

“…Socio-economics include demographic, economic, technological, political, and cultural factors (Brooks et al, 2001;Lambin et al, 2003;Lepers et al, 2005), all of which contribute to rates of human population expansion and landscape change (Contreras-Hermosilla, 2000). Environmental attributes also influence patterns of habitat conversion (Lambin et al, 2003).…”