Toward a Blueprint for Conservation in Africa

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Abstract
In the last two decades, several 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.