Governments have agreed to expand the global protected area network from 13% to 17% of the world's land surface by 2020 (Aichi target 11) and to prevent the further loss of known threatened species (Aichi target 12). These targets are interdependent, as protected areas can stem biodiversity loss when strategically located and effectively managed. However, the global protected area estate is cur...

The impacts of introduced mammalian predators on the viability of bird populations in forest, river and coastal habitats in New Zealand are well known. However, a common understanding of their impacts in freshwater wetlands is lacking. We review evidence for impacts of introduced mammalian predators on freshwater birds, particularly specialist species restricted to wetlands, and use this inform...

Species' geographical distributions are tracking latitudinal and elevational surface temperature gradients under global climate change. To evaluate the opportunities to track these gradients across space, we provide a first baseline assessment of the steepness of these gradients for the world's terrestrial birds. Within the breeding ranges of 9,014 bird species, we characterized the spatial gra...

How many species are likely as-yet unknown to science? Even in relatively well-known groups, there may be substantial numbers of such species. It seems likely that these unknown species will be rare and threatened with extinction. Indeed, science may not discover them before they go extinct. We address these issues for a sample of endemic flowering plants and three vertebrate groups: amphibians...

The IUCN Red List has assessed the global distributions of the majority of the world's amphibians, birds and mammals. Yet these assessments lack explicit reference to widely available, remotely-sensed data that can sensibly inform a species' risk of extinction. Our first goal is to add additional quantitative data to the existing standardised process that IUCN employs. Secondly, we ask: do our ...

Grasslands are characteristic physiognomies of the Brazilian Cerrado domain. One of last remnants of these threatened environments in the state of São Paulo is located in Itirapina Ecological Station, considered as an Important Bird Area (IBA). We investigated bird assemblages that use seasonally flooded grasslands, and predominantly dry grasslands, from August 2010 until July 2011. We focused ...

Between species differences in research effort can lead to biases in our global view of evolution, ecology and conservation. The increase in meta-taxonomic comparative analyses on birds underlines the need to better address how research effort is distributed in this class. Methods have been developed to choose which species should be studied to obtain unbiased comparative data sets, but a preci...

Habitat loss and attendant fragmentation threaten the existence of many species. Conserving these species requires a straightforward and objective method that quantifies how these factors affect their survival. Therefore, we compared a variety of metrics that assess habitat fragmentation in bird ranges, using the geographical ranges of 127 forest endemic passerine birds inhabiting the Atlantic ...

Changaram wetland is an important stopover ground for migratory shorebirds, gulls, terns, and other waterbirds in the western coast of Kerala it encompasses major habitats like exposed mudflats, mangrove fringes, agroecosystem. A total 77 species (shorebirds, large wading birds, terns) including long distance migrants, local resident were encountered our survey carried out during 2018 2019. Ten...