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Toward a Blueprint for Conservation in Africa

I the last two decades, various quantitative techniques for assessing conservation priorities have been developed, based on data about the distribution of species (Reid 1998, Williams 1998, Margules and Pressey 2000). These methods have been applied extensively in temperate regions such as North America at both the state (Csuti et al. 1997) and national (Dobson et al. 1997) levels. However, biological diversity is concentrated in the tropics, and it is here that conservation faces the most pressing threats (Raven 1988). Furthermore, fine resolution data are often so scarce and local land-use patterns so diverse as to limit our ability to apply quantitative prioritization techniques at fine scales (Pimm and Lawton 1998). Hence, such techniques may be particularly appropriate for application in tropical areas and at continental scales. Until recently this application has been restricted to single families (Kershaw et al. 1994, 1995) or orders (Hacker et al. 1998), because continent-level species distribution data from the tropics are rarely compiled. Recognizing this limitation, the Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen embarked on a program to compile continent-level data on the distributions of tropical species. Such data have allowed the use of quantitative conservation prioritization techniques for birds, for which data are better than for other taxa, in both South America and Africa (Burgess et al. 1997, de Klerk 1998, Fjeldså and Rahbek 1997, 1998, 1999). Simultaneously, the museum has compiled data from Africa for three other major taxa: mammals, snakes, and amphibians (Burgess et al. 1998). The Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen intends to publish these data as an atlas of African biodiversity. This article begins a series planned to extend these analyses across four major terrestrial taxa, for an entire tropical continent. For each taxon we first present an overview of patterns of species richness and narrow endemism across the continent. Second, we use these patterns to identify areas of high conservation priority that can most efficiently represent each group of species. Finally, we repeat the analysis for threatened species (Baillie and Groombridge 1996), the immediate priorities for conservation in Africa. Numerous important issues remain to be addressed, and we conclude the article with a detailed discussion of them. In our ongoing research we are address four in particular. First is the question of surrogacy—how well do conservation priorities for one taxon represent other taxa? Second is the matter of incorporating socioeconomic variables into the analyses, both as pressure (e.g., human population) and as response (e.g., existing protected areas) variables—the need to do so is urgent. The third issue involves scale: We are using environmental models to increase the resolution of the databases to scales relevant to local (rather than continental) conser-