Summary
The Yellow Cardinal Gubernatrix cristata is a globally endangered passerine from the southern cone of South America. Because of its conspicuous plumage and very attractive song, it suffers considerably from illegal pet trade. The largest remaining populations are found in Argentina, but no coordinated efforts have been made thus far to understand better its current distribution and conservation status. During three annual surveys supported by a citizen science programme, more than 140 volunteers surveyed 644 geographical points during spring and detected 221 Yellow Cardinals. Based on the survey results, we evaluated the presence of cardinals within protected areas in Argentina and found that the species was only detected in four of them, two of which were private reserves with a low level of protection. We also found that the species was not restricted to the ‘Espinal’ ecoregion, but also inhabited ‘Monte’ and ‘Chaco’ ecoregions, which are generally drier. This citizen science programme allowed us to obtain up-to-date information on the remaining populations of the Yellow Cardinal and helped to increase public awareness about the conservation problems faced by the species. We propose some future strategies for monitoring Yellow Cardinals and taking informed conservation decisions.
The Neotropical region is characterized by the high species richness of birds, whose protection and inventories show biases due to lack of geographic representation and species diversity. In Entre Ríos province its protected areas have not been well established, generating biases in biodiversity representativeness. We updated the birds' inventory of Entre Ríos with 80,000 records. The province was divided into 39 cells of 0.5° lat-long to analyze birds' richness and priority areas through a complementary analysis. The Protected Areas (PAs) system was overlapped with the complementary areas to detect gap conservation areas. Entre Ríos presents 396 bird species and needs 10 cells to protect them all. The priority areas included cells on the Paraná and Uruguay rivers. These priority areas overlap poorly with the current PAs system. We recommend the creation of new PAs or change the protection categories of PAs that overlap with priority areas selected. This work revaluates the importance of updated inventories to perform spatial prioritization and contrast the current PAs system to generate representative and efficient systems.
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