In Conservation Sweet Spots, Protecting Birds Helps People and Climate

From the Autumn 2025 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

A new study published in June in the journal Ecosystem Services identifies key regions across the U.S. where investments can deliver triple benefits for people, the climate, and birds. These conservation sweet spots support significant numbers of more than half of U.S. bird species, including 75% of forest birds.

“We wanted to think about how places that we might focus our conservation attention might provide cobenefits for biodiversity, including birds, as well as for people,” lead author Rachel Neugarten, executive director of conservation planning at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said. “One of the big takeaways is that these win-win-wins do exist.”

Researchers from WCS and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology used data from a previous study that mapped priority areas in the U.S. for 11 different ecosystem services, including pollination, recreation, carbon storage, and flood mitigation. They then combined that information with abundance data on 479 bird species across the U.S. from eBird, a participatory science biodiversity data set managed by the Cornell Lab.

Overlaying bird population data with information about ecosystem service and carbon storage priority areas, researchers found regions that benefit people, the climate, and birds the most are the Appalachian Mountains, New England, the southeastern U.S., the Ozarks, and the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges—all densely forested areas.

“Forests are ecosystem service machines. … The number of benefits they provide is really diverse, and the magnitude of the benefits are really high,” Neugarten said, referring to how forests store vast amounts of carbon, provide timber, reduce floods, improve water quality, and provide recreation.

The priority areas identified in the study host a sizable population of nearly half of all U.S. bird species and more than 75% of forest bird species, including several Tipping Point species—birds identified in the 2025 State of the Birds report that have lost half of their populations in the last 50 years. For example, 91% of the Cerulean Warbler population lives in ecosystem services priority areas and 94% lives in carbon priority areas.

In a world where conservation funding is shrinking and birds are declining at an alarming rate, the researchers say their findings can help target conservation actions in areas that maximize benefits for people, climate, and biodiversity.

“We have to be strategic about where we work,” Jon Fisher at the Pew Charitable Trusts, who was not involved in the study, said “This kind of research is useful to inform where and how we work.”

A longer version of this story was originally published on the Mongabay news website. Read the original version.