A GIS-based policy support tool to determine national responsibilities and priorities for biodiversity conservation

the geographical data for administrative units (country areas, borderlines) from EuroGeo- graphics can be downloaded from [45]. For the background map we used cross-blended hyp- sometric tints with relief, water, drains, and ocean bottom in scale of 1:10 million that is publicly available under the Creative Commons license from Natural Earth [46]. Case studies of bird species in Asia by Global Environmental Zones counts and Global Environmental Zones area. Here, we selected 58 Asian countries and regions as the focal areas or reference areas and categorized them according to their biogeographic characteristics: (1) tropical or temperate climate, (2) small or large area, (3) island or mainland. Birds that are (1) widespread and (2) migratory are considered too, although their distribution ranges exceed or lie outside of the reference area, respectively. However, it is not the aim of this study to dis- cuss special aspects of national responsibility assessments related to migration or animal movement; our purpose is simply to demonstrate our tool, using this dataset as an example. We determined the national responsibility scores and conservation priorities for 258 bird spe- cies (from BirdLife International http://www.birdlife.org) in the 58 Asian focal countries (see S3 File). Nine of the bird species were vulnerable (VU); eight were near-threatened (NT), and 241 were of least concern (LC). We performed two analyses, both of which used GEnZ [50], but differed by the choice of either the ‘By biome-area’ option in the panel (Polygon Area-Approach) or the ‘By biome

count’ (Polygon Count-Approach) option. Both approaches use the polygons of the chosen map as the ecological units/regions (GEnZ in our case). S1 Data gives an example for the content of the output files (dBase) for the results based on the Polygon Count-Approach and the Polygon Area-Approach shown in Figs 8 and 9. S2 Data provides a comparison of results for countries having medium national responsibility for at least one out of 258 species studied. The authors are solely responsible for the content and functionality of these materials. Queries (other than absence of the material) should be directed to the corresponding author. Results Using the Polygon Count-Approach two bird species were classified as “local” (locally distrib- uted), six as “regional” (regionally distributed), and 250 as “wide” (widely distributed) accord- ing to Schmeller et al. [1, 36] (Table 3, S1 and S2 Data). National responsibility Our assessment of national responsibility shows that only a few countries, most in the south of Asia (China, Laos, Brunei, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar/Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan), have high to very high national responsibility scores for the analyzed bird species (Fig 8A and 8B) with China responsible for the highest number of species. The ranking of the countries in the list corresponds to the number of species for which they have high and very high national responsibility scores. Thirteen countries (Myanmar, Vietnam, Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, China, Thailand, India,

Cambodia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan; Fig 8C and 8D) have medium national responsibility scores for at least 40 species, which represents the 75%-quartile of the distribu- tion of the number of species for which a country is responsible (see Table 3, S2 Data). The countries are ranked according to the number of species for which they have medium national responsibility. Comparing the results produced by the two approaches available in our tool, we found some differences. When we used the PA-A instead of the PC-A, no country gained more than four additional species and the maximum number of species for which a country lost medium responsibility was 10. However, over all countries the net change was zero PLOS ONE GIS-based policy support tool to determine national responsibilities for biodiversity conservation PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243135 December 3, 2020 14 / 23