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Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

NonprofitSandy, United Kingdom
About: Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is a nonprofit organization based out in Sandy, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Biodiversity. The organization has 670 authors who have published 1425 publications receiving 88006 citations. The organization is also known as: RSPB & Plumage League.


Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This work identified the top 25 priority islands for invasive species eradication that together would benefit extant populations of 155 native species including 45 globally threatened species and identified the 5 most valuable islands.
Abstract: Invasive alien species are one of the primary threats to native biodiversity on islands worldwide. Consequently, eradicating invasive species from islands has become a mainstream conservation practice. Deciding which islands have the highest priority for eradication is of strategic importance to allocate limited resources to achieve maximum conservation benefit. Previous island prioritizations focused either on a narrow set of native species or on a small geographic area. We devised a prioritization approach that incorporates all threatened native terrestrial vertebrates and all invasive terrestrial vertebrates occurring on 11 U.K. overseas territories, which comprise over 2000 islands ranging from the sub-Antarctic to the tropics. Our approach includes eradication feasibility and distinguishes between the potential and realistic conservation value of an eradication, which reflects the benefit that would accrue following eradication of either all invasive species or only those species for which eradication techniques currently exist. We identified the top 25 priority islands for invasive species eradication that together would benefit extant populations of 155 native species including 45 globally threatened species. The 5 most valuable islands included the 2 World Heritage islands Gough (South Atlantic) and Henderson (South Pacific) that feature unique seabird colonies, and Anegada, Little Cayman, and Guana Island in the Caribbean that feature a unique reptile fauna. This prioritization can be rapidly repeated if new information or techniques become available, and the approach could be replicated elsewhere in the world.

71 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Land-cover change is of major concern to conservationists because of its generally negative impact on biodiversity, and there is a clear need to track these changes, and such information could make a major contribution to a global biodiversity observation system.
Abstract: Land-cover change is of major concern to conservationists because of its generally negative impact on biodiversity (Brooks et al. 2002). There is a clear need to track these changes, and such information could make a major contribution to a global biodiversity observation system. Monitoring of biodiversity is an essential component of conservation because it allows problems to be identified, priorities to be set, solutions to be developed, and resources to be targeted (Balmford et al. 2003). Monitoring also allows assessments of progress toward targets and indicators in unilateral and international conservation-policy instruments (e.g., Convention on Biological Diversity [CDB]), of the impacts of international conservation policy (Donald et al. 2007), and of other policy sectors (Donald et al. 2001). Nevertheless, a paucity of information has led to a poor understanding of the cost-effectiveness of conservation policies (Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006), exposing them to criticism (Stokstad 2005). The overwhelming majority of species and ecosystems receive no systematic monitoring, and there is a conspicuous mismatch between the distribution of monitoring effort and the distribution of terrestrial biodiversity at a global scale (Green et al. 2005). The need to improve monitoring is widely recognized (Balmford et al. 2003; Pereira and Cooper 2006), and although some systematic monitoring of terrestrial biodiversity for conservation is undertaken locally in the developing world (e.g., Danielsen et al. 2008), there is no protocol to tackle the issue at a global scale. Traditionally, monitoring of popu-

71 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the cost-effectiveness of government expenditure by comparing the cost of grant aid with the ecosystem restoration potential of new woodlands and found that the most cost-effective woodlands were established close to existing woodlands using natural colonisation techniques.

71 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The results show that compensation through vigilance for the increased predation risk manifest in a patch's physical characteristics may greatly reduce the profitability of a patch.

71 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: There were about three-year cycles in the populations of arctic foxes and lemmings, and the breeding productivities of brent geese and curlew sandpipers on the Taimyr Peninsula, Russia as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: There were about three-year cycles in the populations of arctic foxes, and the breeding productivities of brent geese and curlew sandpipers on the Taimyr Peninsula, Russia, The populations of arctic foxes and lemmings changed in synchrony. The breeding productivities of the birds tended to be good when the arctic foxes were increasing in numbers and poor when the arctic foxes were decreasing. There was a negative relationship between arctic fox numbers (or occupied lairs) and the breeding productivity of brent geese in the following year. Although there was evidence of wide-spread synchrony In the lemming cycle across the Taimyr Peninsula, some localities showed differences, However, such sites would still have been influenced by the general pattern of fox abundance in the typical tundra zone of the Taimyr Peninsula, where most of the arctic foxes breed and from which extensive movements of foxes occur after a decline in lemming numbers. The results support a prey-switching hypothesis (also known as the alternative prey hypothesis) whereby arctic foxes, and other predators, feed largely on lemmings when these are abundant or increasing, but switch to birds when the lemming population is small or declining. The relationships between arctic foxes, lemmings and brent geese may be further influenced by snowny owls which create fox-exclusion zones around their nests, thus providing safe nesting areas for the geese.

71 citations


Authors

Showing all 672 results

NameH-indexPapersCitations
Andrew Balmford9129033359
Rhys E. Green7828530428
Richard D. Gregory6116518428
Richard Evans4830610513
Rafael Mateo462387091
Deborah J. Pain46996717
Jeremy D. Wilson4512312587
Les G. Underhill452338217
Richard B. Bradbury421138062
Paul F. Donald4111711153
James W. Pearce-Higgins401445623
Jörn P. W. Scharlemann408416393
Juliet A. Vickery391168494
Mark A. Taggart381113703
Patrick W Thompson381446379
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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Institution in previous years
YearPapers
20224
202190
202073
201993
201882
201770