Global mammal distributions, biodiversity hotspots, and conservation

doi:10.1073/pnas.0609334103

Global mammal distributions, biodiversity hotspots, and conservation

Gerardo Ceballos*,^† and
Paul R. Ehrlich^†,^‡

*Departamento de Ecologia de la Biodiversidad, Instituto de Ecología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apdo Postal 70-245, 04510 México D.F., México; and
^‡Center for Conservation Biology, Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020

Contributed by Paul R. Ehrlich, October 24, 2006

Author contributions: G.C. and P.R.E. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper. (received for review September 20, 2006)

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Fig. 1.
Patterns of species distribution of mammals throughout the world, showing species richness (A), restricted-range species (B), and threatened species (C). All scales are in terms of number of species per 10,000-km² grid cell. (See Materials and Methods for further details.)
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Fig. 2.
Hotspots of species richness (A), restricted-range species (B), and threatened species (C). The 2.5% hotspots are shown in red, and the 5% hotspots are shown in yellow and red.
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Fig. 3.
Congruence of mammalian species richness, restricted-range species, and threatened species in the 2.5% (A) and 5% (B) hotspot grid cells. Note the relatively high number of species shared by all grid cells in the 5% hotspots. Percentages are of total number of mammal species represented in three types of hotspots (see Table 2).
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Fig. 4.
Comparison of the percentage of species represented in the three types of hotspots of diversity between mammals (blue bars) and birds (red bars, data from ref. 4).
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Fig. 5.
Congruence of mammalian species richness, restricted-range species, and threatened species clearly increases as a function of both the number of cells considered as hotspots (A) and the area covered by the hotspots (B). In A, the percentages of cells considered hotspots, 2.5%, 5%, 20%, and 40%, are represented as 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively, on the x axis. In B, the areas covered by the hotspots, 10,000, 20,000, 40,000, and 90,000 km², are represented as 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively, on the x axis. The blue line indicates the percentage of species shared by the three types of hotspots; the red line indicates the percentage of species found in only one of the three types of hotspots.