Setting Conservation Priorities for Landbirds in the United States: The Partners in Flight Approach

Partners in Flight (PIF) was created in 1990 in response to concern for declining populations of Neotropical migratory songbirds (Robbins et al. 1986, Askins et al. 1990) and in the realization that conservation of these species required efforts beyond the ability of any single organization or agency (Finch and Stangel 1993). In subsequent years, PIF expanded its mandate to include all nongame landbirds and succeeded in raising awareness regarding the status of bird populations, but it had difficulty recommending which specific conservation actions were most warranted. In 1995, PIF began a comprehensive planning effort to conserve nongame landbirds and their habitats throughout the United States. A critical first step in the planning process was to establish clear and consistent priorities among the several hundred landbird species based on their vulnerability and need for conservation action. To this end, PIF developed a species prioritization process for the southeastern United States (Carter and Barker 1993, Hunter et al. 1993) by modifying earlier efforts (Millsap et al. 1990, Master 1991) and later expanded the effort to include all of North America north of Mexico. This prioritization process has been reviewed extensively by local and regional bird experts and most recently by the AOU Conservation Committee (see Beissinger et al. 2000). Here, we describe the species prioritization process and provide the context for its application in conservation.