TopSpots

There are so many areas in the world that need conservation action that we must prioritise where the limited resources available should be allocated to achieve the greatest gains. Many methods have been developed that help to do this and they recognise that species are not evenly distributed around the world, that threats differ in type and intensity and that technical as well as financial resources are limited. Most of these tools use either the number of species present (species richness) or the number of species only found in a particular location (endemism) to identify areas where conservation can have the highest payoff in biodiversity terms.

Because Durrell focuses on the most threatened species in the most threatened places, we have developed an approach that allows us to identify areas that are not only very important for biodiversity but are also very threatened.

Starting with a database of terrestrial regions identified by their ecological characteristics (ecoregions), we compared patterns of species richness and endemism for each region, identifying those areas which had the highest endemism relative to the total number of species. These are areas that are of interest not just to Durrell, but also to the worldwide conservation community to protect.

We then combined the top 100 ecoregions ranked by this approach with the top 100 ecoregions ranked by the number of threatened species (based on the IUCN Red List database) and together they create a new map for biodiversity conservation that identifies global areas of importance. We call these areas our TopSpots. 

Islands, where plants and animals evolved in isolation, dominate the top 50 locations and include the Galápagos Islands, which helped Charles Darwin to develop the theory of evolution, Mascarenes, Madagascar and Comoros. Highlands su

ch as the Tropical Andes in South America, which provide challenging and often isolated environments for the creatures that live in them, are next in the priority list, followed by certain continental lowlands. These TopSpots provide the priority locations around the world for Durrell’s conservation work.