Effectiveness of protected areas in conserving tropical forest birds

Victor Cazalis (1) , Karine Princé (2, 3, 4) , Jean-Baptiste Mihoub (2) , Joseph Kelly (1, 5) , Stuart H M Butchart (6) , Ana S.L. Rodrigues (1)

1 CEFE - Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive
2 CESCO - Centre d'Ecologie et des Sciences de la COnservation
3 LBBE - Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Evolutive - UMR 5558
4 University of Wisconsin-Madison
5 NDHU - National Dong Hwa University
6 BirdLife International

Protected areas (PAs) are the cornerstones of global biodiversity conservation efforts, but to fulfil this role they must be effective at conserving the ecosystems and species that occur within their boundaries. Adequate monitoring datasets that allow comparing biodiversity between protected and unprotected sites are lacking in tropical regions. Here we use the largest citizen science biodiversity dataset-eBird-to quantify the extent to which protected areas in eight tropical forest biodiversity hotspots are effective at retaining bird diversity. We find generally positive effects of protection on the diversity of bird species that are forest-dependent, endemic to the hotspots, or threatened or Near Threatened, but not on overall bird species richness. Furthermore, we show that in most of the hotspots examined this benefit is driven by protected areas preventing both forest loss and degradation. Our results provide evidence that, on average, protected areas contribute measurably to conserving bird species in some of the world's most diverse and threatened terrestrial ecosystems.

Keywords: protected areas; citizen science; effectiveness; birds

Domains: Biodiversity

Victor Cazalis, Karine Princé, Jean-Baptiste Mihoub, Joseph Kelly, Stuart H M Butchart, et al.. Effectiveness of protected areas in conserving tropical forest birds. Nature Communications, 2020, 11 (1), ⟨10.1038/s41467-020-18230-0⟩. ⟨hal-02940371⟩