Important Bird Areas are benchmarks in the conservation and management of bird species and diversity. IBA’s in Zambia by Peter Leonard, describes in detail 42 sites in Zambia meeting the IBA criteria. Published by the Zambian Ornithological Society, this book contains excellent maps for every area, lists of the relevant species and their conservation status, a full description of the site and other fauna and flora present and, crucially, an outline of conservation and management issues for the area.
Important Bird Area information from BirdLife International:
The selection of Important Bird Areas (IBAs) has been a particularly effective way of identifying conservation priorities. IBAs are key sites for conservation – small enough to be conserved in their entirety and often already part of a protected-area network. They do one (or more) of three things:
- Hold significant numbers of one or more globally threatened species
- Are one of a set of sites that together hold a suite of restricted-range species or biome-restricted species
- Have exceptionally large numbers of migratory or congregatory species