A new study identifies key regions across the U.S. where investments can deliver triple benefits for people, the climate and birds. These conservation sweet spots support significant numbers of more than half of U.S. bird species, including 75% of forest birds.
“We wanted to think about how places that we might focus our conservation attention might provide co-benefits for biodiversity, including birds, as well as for people,” lead author Rachel Neugarten from the Wildlife Conservation Society told Mongabay. “One of the big takeaways is that these win-win-wins do exist.”
Researchers used data from a previous study that mapped priority areas in the U.S. for 11 different ecosystem services, including pollination, recreation, carbon storage and flood mitigation. They then combined that information with abundance data on 479 bird species across the U.S. from eBird, a citizen science biodiversity data set.
Overlaying bird population data with information about ecosystem service and carbon storage priority areas, researchers found regions that benefit people, the climate and birds the most are the Appalachian Mountains, New England, the southeastern U.S., the Ozarks and the Sierra and Cascade mountain ranges — all densely forested areas.
“Forests are ecosystem service machines. …The number of benefits they provide is really diverse, and the magnitude of the benefits are really high,” Neugarten said, referring to how forests store vast amounts of carbon, provide timber, reduce floods, improve water quality and provide recreation.
The priority areas identified in the study host a sizable population of nearly half of all U.S. bird species and more than 75% of forest bird species, including several “tipping point species” — those that have lost nearly half of their population in the last 50 years and continue to decline. For example, 91% of the cerulean warbler (Setophaga cerulea) population lives in ecosystem services priority areas and 94% lives in carbon priority areas.
However, wetland and arid land birds, such as LeConte’s thrasher (Toxostoma lecontei), appear to have less overlap with important ecosystem service and carbon benefit areas compared with forest birds. Wetlands provide immense ecosystem services and carbon benefits, but Neugarten notes that forests are geographically larger than wetlands and provide such high levels of ecosystem benefits that they likely drown out contributions from wetlands and coastal areas in the analysis.
“These win-win-wins are not guaranteed,” Neugarten said of the finding, as conservation investments in wetlands and coastal areas may benefit some birds but not others.
In a world where conservation funding is shrinking and birds are declining at an alarming rate, the researchers say their findings can help target conservation actions in areas that maximize benefits for people, climate and biodiversity.
“We have to be strategic about where we work,” Jon Fisher at the Pew Charitable Trusts, who was not involved in the study, told Mongabay by email. “This kind of research is useful to inform where and how we work.”
Banner image: Cerulean warbler by Alan Schimierer via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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