Conservation status of Phasianidae in Southeast Asia

Local and regional extirpations of individual species, typically high profile cases, are now well documented, leading to calls for urgent action for particular species in specific locations. There is a need to broaden our assessments of extinction to identify landscapes that contain high proportions of threatened species and therefore, how more holistic species conservation responses might be developed. The conservation status of species is especially concerning in Southeast Asia and within the region, the avian family Phasianidae affords the opportunity to develop an approach for examining species richness and extinction probability for an entire family at landscape scale. There are 42 pheasant, partridge and quail species in the region and 77% of Southeast Asia encompasses the geographic range of at least five species. Due to high levels of uncertainty about how species respond to anthropogenic threats, we created an expert elicited Bayesian Belief Network to explore survival prospects using publically available data on IUCN extinction probability categories, proxies of threat (effects of hunting, forest loss and protected area effectiveness) and species geographic ranges to assess where the overall risk to survival was highest. Western Myanmar, Central Indoburma (Thailand/Myanmar), the Annamite mountains and Central Vietnam lowlands, Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo are priorities for avoiding large numbers of extinctions of phasianids. This assessment will be strengthened by more detailed data on intensity of hunting pressure across the region, and variation in species' tolerance to human disturbance. Strategically, therefore, conservation and research should be targeted towards these landscapes.