Important Bird Areas and potential Ramsar Sites in Europe

The geographic extent of Europe as considered in this report encompasses Greenland, western Russia (all administrative regions lying mainly west of the Ural mountains and Ural river), Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Cyprus and all of Turkey. The Important Bird Areas (IBA) Programme of BirdLife International is a worldwide initiative aimed at identifying and protecting a network of critical sites for the conservation of the world’s birds. The first IBA inventory to cover the whole of Europe was published in 1989 (Grimmett and Jones 1989). Facilitated since 1990 by a coordinator at the BirdLife International Secretariat and, increasingly, by national IBA Coordinators in individual countries, the actions of many individuals and organisations have coalesced into a large-scale European IBA Programme. This has resulted in the production of twenty national IBA inventories and recently a new pan-European inventory (Heath & Evans 2000). Building on these inventories, the European IBA Programme for the last decade has addressed site-oriented research and action, encompassing habitat management, monitoring, education, advocacy, and national and international legal protection. A total of 4,000 IBAs have been identified in Europe currently. The conservation status of each has been measured using seven core indicators, which has generated a large amount of data. Most of these data are available online at http://www.birdlife.org.uk/sites