Global versus Local Conservation Focus of U.S. State Agency Endangered Bird Species Lists Jeffrey V. Wells 1 *, Bruce Robertson 2 , Kenneth V. Rosenberg 3 , David W. Mehlman 4 1 Boreal Songbird Initiative, Seattle, Washington, United States of America, 2 W. K. Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State University, Hickory Corners, Michigan, United States of America, 3 Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States of America, 4 The Nature Conservancy, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States of America Abstract The development of species priorities for conservation at local or regional scales (for example, within a state or province) poses an interesting paradox. One the one hand, locally or regionally-derived species priorities may lead to greater interest in and resources directed to biodiversity conservation by local or regional institutions. On the other hand, locally or regionally-derived species priorities could overlook national or global priorities. We assessed U.S. state government agency endangered-threatened bird lists to determine the comparative representation of species of global versus local conservation significance on them. State lists tended to be represented primarily by species of low global risk-low global responsibility (range: 15–100%; mean 51%) and high global risk-high global responsibility (range: 0–73%; mean 35%). In 25 states, more than half of the species on the state lists were in the low global risk-low global responsibility category. Most U.S. state agency lists represent a combined strategy of highlighting species of both local and global conservation significance. Even with this combined local-global strategy, most state lists were predominated by species that represent local but not global conservation significance. Such a strategy could have profound negative consequences for many species that are not formally recognized under national endangered species protections but that are also left off of state- level endangered species lists. Citation: Wells JV, Robertson B, Rosenberg KV, Mehlman DW (2010) Global versus Local Conservation Focus of U.S. State Agency Endangered Bird Species Lists. PLoS ONE 5(1): e8608. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008608 Editor: Sean Rands, University of Bristol, United Kingdom Received April 14, 2008; Accepted November 23, 2009; Published January 6, 2010 Copyright: ß 2010 Wells et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: jeffwells@borealbirds.org Introduction Given the widespread and growing worldwide problem of species declines and extinctions, prioritizing species in need of conservation attention is an essential step in allocating limited financial or human resources. Although many globally threatened species have been identified through standardized ranking systems (e.g. IUCN Red List, NatureServe), the burden of identifying priority species at smaller geographic scales often falls on agencies or institutions operating within political boundaries much smaller than the geographic ranges of most species. The development of species priorities for conservation at local or regional scales poses an interesting paradox. Locally or regionally-derived species priorities may lead to greater interest in and resources directed to biodiversity conservation by local or regional institutions. Ideally, a set of locally derived priorities would, collectively, serve to protect or conserve species that are most vulnerable at the global scale. If, however, locally derived species priorities do not reflect species’ range-wide or global priorities, conservation actions may potentially have the undesired effect of promoting local species diversity (within political boundaries) at the expense of global diversity. Two important considerations in developing species conserva- tion priorities are the scale (globally or locally) at which the level of extinction risk is applied [1–10] and the biological capacity of a region to contribute towards sustaining populations of a species based on the proportion of the global population that occurs there—a concept that has been labeled ‘‘responsibility’’ [2,4,11– 13]. Each species within a region can be assessed against these two factors. Within a given region, a U.S. state for example, there will be some species that occur there that are of high global extinction risk and some that are of low global extinction risk. There will also be some species for which the state has high global responsibility and some for which the state has low global responsibility. Each species that occurs within a given state can then be placed into one of four categories: high global risk – high global responsibility, high global risk – low global responsibility, low global risk – high global responsibility, and low global risk – low global responsibility (Fig. 1). In the U.S. there has been widespread development of local and regional conservation capacity, most notably at the state level [14]. In 48 of 50 U.S. states, this has been associated with the development of state endangered, threatened, and/or special concern (E-T-SC) species lists that are used to guide resource, and in some cases, regulatory decisions of government wildlife management institutions [14–15]. In a policy review of U.S. state endangered species legislation, George et al. [15] found a wide range of approaches and philosophies embodied in the various state endangered species acts and state government E-T-SC species lists. In interviews with agency staff they found that some state agencies viewed globally or nationally endangered species as the highest priority for state-level conservation while others considered it the state’s role to highlight species that were at risk of extinction in their state but not at risk at the global or national level [15]. PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 January 2010 | Volume 5 | Issue 1 | e8608