Important Bird Area

Some countries have a National IBA Conservation Strategy, whereas in others protection is completely lacking.

[3] In 1985, following a specific request from the European Economic Community, Birdlife International drew up a list of sites to be protected as a matter of priority.

At first the official name of this type of site was Important Bird Area, hence the acronym IBA, then at the BirdLife World Congress held in Canada in 2014 it was decided to adopt the name Important Bird and Biodiversity Area, without changing the acronym.

To be listed as an IBA, a site must satisfy at least one of the following rating criteria:[5] The site qualifies if it is known, estimated or thought to hold a population of a species categorized by the IUCN Red List as Critically Endangered, Endangered or Vulnerable.

The assessment by expert individuals is however not entirely reliable and a study in South America found that the coverage needed for at-risk bird conservation as chosen by computational algorithms rarely overlapped with IBAs and suggested that such methods should be used to complement expert driven IBA site choices.