IBAs in Mongolia

Important Bird Areas (IBA) or Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas are internationally important areas for the conservation of birds and other biodiversity. They are identified using objective, internationally accepted criteria, and are used to guide conservation planning, action and sustainable development. As well as their importance for biodiversity, IBAs provide a range of ecosystem goods and services important to human communities, and provide a focus for birdwatching, wildlife photography and other recreational activities. Currently, there are 70 IBAs identified in Mongolia.

As a group, birds have many features that make them good indicators for the selection of important sites that also have wider biodiversity importance, for example:

• They contain high numbers of globally threatened and restricted-range species, and their distributions overlap with those of other globally threatened and endemic, but less well-known, taxa;
• They are widely distributed at all elevations, in almost all habitats (including those that are semi-natural) and throughout all geographical regions;
• They have well understood distributions and habitat requirements, and are relatively easy to record and identify in the field;
• They are good indicators of habitat condition and human disturbance, and provide a means of relatively easily monitoring ecological changes over time;
• Criteria exist (and have been developed over a period of over 20 years) for the objective identification of important sites for birds at global and regional scales; 
• They can act as flagships for conservation, and there is a large community of people, amateur and professional, who are motivated to work for their conservation.

Birds are also an important conservation focus in their own right. They perform ecological roles essential to the function of ecosystems, such as seed-dispersal and pollination, and they have economic values, particularly as a basis for nature based tourism, a growing industry in parts of Mongolia.

Link to a special page on IBAs in Mongolia, http://wscc.org.mn/iba.html 

From this page, boundary polygons and center points of Mongolia's IBAs can be downloaded in several formats. GIS shp files are in UTM projection (zone N48).