Key Biodiversity Areas in Guinea

This is a presentation of Guinean Key Biodiversity Areas.

Abstract:

The Guinean Forests of West Africa is one of the most highly fragmented of the 34 global Biodiversity hotspots. Adequately conserving Biodiversity unique to this hotspot requires identification of sites where conservation must be undertaken within the larger region. Two previous efforts to do this have either been data-driven but not multi-taxa (Important Bird Areas) or multi-taxa but not data-driven (West Africa Priority Setting Workshop in 1999). We extended these by identifying Key Biodiversity Areas, sites of global significance for Biodiversity Conservation as a data-driven, multi-taxon approach.
We synthesized and analyzed fine-scale distributional data for 72 globally threatened species across 6 taxonomic groups and identified a total of 28 Key Biodiversity Areas covering 14,748 km2.
With geographic information gained on these sites, we've set the first Guinean Key Biodiversity Areas map.
Unfortunately accurate boundaries of most of these KBAs have not been assessed recently. As the second step of our conservation action, we'd like to demonstrate to decision-makers, using GIS tools, how severe the habitat loss is for threatened species by comparing two periods of time. This work could also help in planning conservation actions within these sites.

http://www.conservationgis.org/ecphistory/Ecp2007PapersC.html