Migratory waterfowls as indicators to assess the protection efficiency in Iran

Abstract

There are high numbers of endangered birds in Iran. Birds also are indicators of biodiversity in different landscapes and using birds as indicator give us a complete overview about the ecological status of the landscape. In the present study migratory waterfowls were used to identify biodiversity hotspots in Iran. Iran is an interesting place for ornithologists because it is in fact a crossroads of flyways for migratory waterfowls coming from Europe, southern Asia, and Siberia. We predicted the habitat distributions for 27 bird species of Anseriformes in Iran using an ensemble forecasting framework to identify biodiversity hotspots. Moreover, we measured the percentage of overlap between hotspots and protected areas including Ramsar sites. The results showed that suitable habitats for different bird species greatly varied among different ecosystems and they showed dissimilar responses to environmental variables. However, for most species digital elevation model (DEM) was the most important variable in predicting suitable habitats. Our study also revealed that 36.02% of Iran can be considered as suitable habitats for the species and the highest suitability belongs to areas along Zagros and Alborz mountain ranges. Furthermore, the suitable habitats had 7.10% overlap with protected areas and 75% with Ramsar sites. The low overlap between hotspots and protected areas demonstrated the shortage of biodiversity protection in Iran. Therefore, it is essential to select new protected areas based on biodiversity hotspots, and to develop a network of protected areas within those hotspots in Iran.