ECOLOGICAL NICHE MODELING APPROACHES TO CONSERVATION OF ENDANGERED AND THREATENED BIRDS IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

Abstract. — Comprehensive biodiversity surveys are unavailable for most Central and Eastern European countries. Although birds in general are well-studied, distributional information in the region is sparse and largely out-of of-date; I used museum specimen locality records and raster GIS data layers summarizing environmental dimensions to produce distributional hypotheses for the 36 threatened and endangered bird species in the region using ecological niche modeling. These ecological niche models were also used to predict likely future (2055) distributional shifts owing to global climate change. The entire suite of distributional information that resulted was used to evaluate strategies for conservation via simple heuristic place-prioritization algorithms based on complementarity and rarity considerations. These analyses identified priority areas in southern and eastern Romania, as well as other areas across the region, as priority targets for conservation action in the region. Key words. — central and eastern Europe, conservation priority, distribution, endangered bird species. Europe is generally viewed as fortunate regarding documentation of its biodiversity, with populations monitored in a few instances even over centuries (Haslett 2002). However, comparatively little has been accomplished in the past 50 yr in documenting biodiversity in former communist block countries, which have seen comparatively little priority placed on study or conservation of their biodiversity. Such work has advanced thanks only to individual researchers, with little governmental support; in the Balkans, this situation has been worsened by recent ethnic conflicts. Birds rank among the better-studied taxonomic groups, with roughly half of European countries having long-established regular bird censuses; the half lacking such censuses is concentrated i