Important Birds Areas (IBA)

The Important Bird Areas or IBAs, are areas that play a key role in the protection of birds and biodiversity, whose identification is part of a global project, curated by BirdLife International. The IBA project stems from the need to identify uniform and standardised criteria for the designation of SPAs. IBAs have been used to assess the adequacy of designated national SPA networks in the Member States. In order to be recognised as an IBA, a site must have at least one of the following characteristics: host a significant number of individuals of one or more species globally threatened; be part of a type of area important for the conservation of particular species (e.g. wetlands); be an area where a particularly high number of migrating birds is concentrated. The resource includes the 2002 inventory of land-based IBAs, updated on the basis of the Berta Maggiore studies carried out between 2008 and 2014, which led to the identification of 4 new Marine IBAs