Prioritizing Crucial Habitats for Biodiversity Conservation in Temperate and Tropical North America and the Caribbean: A Fine-Scale Indexing Approach

Conserving biodiversity requires identifying and prioritizing critical habitats at a fine scale, as coarse-scale approaches often fail to address the needs of specialized and threatened species. This study applies a fine-scale prioritization approach across temperate and tropical regions of North America and the Caribbean using a detailed map of 636 ecosystem types and high-resolution Area of Habitat (AOH) data. We then evaluated the current protection status and risk of future land use changes for each habitat type and prioritized them for conservation. Our results revealed that 38% of the area was identified in the top quartile of high-priority habitats, with 56 (33%) of identified IUCN threatened ecosystem types captured within these areas. Top priority habitats include the Meso-American Premontane Semi-deciduous Forest, Central American Caribbean Evergreen Lowland Forest, and Guerreran Dry Deciduous Forest, all characterized by low protection, high projected land-use conversion, and large numbers of threatened and habitat-specialist species, highlighting their urgent conservation importance in Meso-American and Caribbean tropical forests. Our findings emphasize the need for targeted conservation strategies that consider finer-scale habitat classifications and species requirements to improve the precision of conservation planning, especially where already at-risk species and ecosystems are located, and human land use intensities are high.