1. Intro to Key Biodiversity Areas - nrsalinas/ackbar GitHub Wiki

Key Biodiversity Areas

KBAs are geographic regions deemed as important to preserve global biodiversity. They may or may not be targets of formal conservation actions, such as being part of protected areas initiatives backed by governments or NGOs. However, KBAs have been used to prioritize conservation efforts among environmental stakeholders.

KBAs aims to integrate several other initiatives that have similar goals, such as Important Bird Areas (IBA), Important Plant Areas (IPA), Important Fungus Areas, and Alliance for Zero Extinction sites (AZE), among others.

The delimitation of a KBA is mediated by the application of a set of criteria:

  1. Threatened biodiversity: areas that sustain populations of endangered species or fragments of threatened ecosystems.
  2. Geographically restricted biodiversity: presence of species or aggregations of species that are narrowly distributed.
  3. Ecological integrity: regions that have not been degraded by human activities.
  4. Biological processes: sites that harbor important processes (e.g., reproduction, refugia) in the life cycle of a species or a set of species.
  5. High irreplaceability: zones that are indispensable to achieve a specific conservation goal, provided a quantitative irreplaceability analysis.

In order to propose a site as a new KBA, it is necessary to apply any of the criteria and verify that the corresponding threshold is met.

The reader can find a thorough documentation of KBAs—purpose, criteria application and more—at the World Database of Key Biodiversity Areas. Thus,details of this initiative will not be repeated here.

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