Important Bird Area

History

In 1985, following a specific request from the European Economic Community, Birdlife International drew up a list of sites to be protected as a matter of priority. In 1989, a repertoire of IBAs of Europe was released.

At first the official name of this type of site was Important Bird Area, hence the acronym IBA, then at the BirdLife World Congress held in Canada in 2014 it was decided to adopt the name Important Bird and Biodiversity Area, without changing the acronym.

Criteria

IBAs are determined by an internationally agreed set of criteria. Specific IBA thresholds are set by regional and national governing organizations. To be listed as an IBA, a site must satisfy at least one of the following rating criteria:

• A1. Globally threatened species The site qualifies if it is known, estimated or thought to hold a population of a species categorized by the IUCN Red List as Critically Endangered, Endangered or Vulnerable. In general, the regular presence of a Critical or Endangered species, irrespective of population size, at a site may be sufficient for a site to qualify as an IBA. For Vulnerable species, the presence of more than threshold numbers at a site is necessary to trigger selection.
• A2. Restricted-range species The site forms one of a set selected to ensure that all restricted-range species of an Endemic Bird Area (EBA) or a Secondary Area (SA) are present in significant numbers in at least one site and preferably more.
• A3. Biome-restricted species The site forms one of a set selected to ensure adequate representation of all species restricted to a given biome, both across the biome as a whole and for all of its species in each range state.
• A4. Congregations
  • i. This applies to 'waterbird' species as defined by Delaney and Scott and is modelled on criterion 6 of the Ramsar Convention for identifying wetlands of international importance. Depending upon how species are distributed, the 1% thresholds for the biogeographic populations may be taken directly from Delaney & Scott, they may be generated by combining flyway populations within a biogeographic region or, for those for which no quantitative thresholds are given, they are determined regionally or inter-regionally, as appropriate, using the best available information.
  • ii. This includes those seabird species not covered by Delaney and Scott (2002). Quantitative data are taken from a variety of published and unpublished sources.
  • iii. This is modeled on criterion 5 of the Ramsar Convention for identifying wetlands of international importance. The use of this criterion is discouraged where quantitative data are good enough to permit the application of A4i and A4ii.
  • iv. The site is known or thought to exceed thresholds set for migratory species at bottleneck sites.

The assessment by expert individuals is however not entirely reliable and a study in South America found that the coverage needed for at-risk bird conservation as chosen by computational algorithms rarely overlapped with IBAs and suggested that such methods should be used to complement expert driven IBA site choices.

References

References

1. "Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs) {{!}} BirdLife".
2. (2009-01-28). "Important Bird Areas Program, A Global Currency for Bird Conservation, National Audubon Society". Audubon.org.
3. "Important Bird Areas (IBA). In: UNEP-WCMC. 2010. A-Z Guide of Areas of Biodiversity Importance. UNEP-WCMC. Cambridge, UK. www.biodiversityA-Z.org". Biodiversitya-z.org.
4. (2016). "The Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas of the Socotra archipelago, Yemen".
5. "Global IBA Criteria". Birdlife International.
6. Delaney and Scott(2002) ''Waterbird Population Estimates'' Third Edition, Wetlands International, Wagenigen, The Netherlands {{ISBN. 90 5882 012 2
7. BirdLife International, 2008, [http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/sites/global_criteria.html Global IBA Criteria], accessed 2008-9-27 {{Webarchive. link. (2010-07-07)
8. Niall O’Dea,* Miguel B. Araújo and Robert J. Whittaker (2006) [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1366-9516.2006.00235.x How well do Important Bird Areas represent species and minimize conservation conflict in the tropical Andes?] {{Webarchive. link. (2023-03-14 Diversity and Distributions 12:205–214, accessed 14 March 2023)