Are important bird areas and special protected areas enough for conservation?: the case of Bonelli's eagle in a Mediterranean area

Abstract

The Bonelli’s eagle (BE) is considered by the European Union as a high-priority species for conservation in the Valencian Community (East of Spain). However, in 2006 the European Union opened a legal procedure against the Spanish Kingdom, accused of lacking of an adequate network of special protected areas (SPAs) to preserve the BE in the region. Here we evaluate whether important bird areas (IBAs) and SPAs network is enough to preserve this species, on the basis of a thorough analysis of habitat preferences. A GAP analysis is performed to conduct a revision of current SPAs and BirdLife proposed IBAs. Our results suggest that the current network of SPAs becomes insufficient to protect the BE. The IBAs network, although improves the current network of SPAs, increasing the percentage of BE potential habitat included, also results inadequate. We propose a new SPAs network according to the potential suitable habitat for the species. Given the trade-off between financial investment and the conservation of biodiversity, we propose to maximize the surface of potential habitat included in the protected network minimizing the surface of the region that would be necessary to protect, thus avoiding an unnecessary expense and otherwise unrealistic results.