Map of Life

The Species Protection Index (SPI) captures how adequately Protected Areas or Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures, i.e. conservation areas, conserve habitat and support the health and survival of species and their populations. The SPI is calculated annually across tens of thousands of terrestrial vertebrate, marine fish and mammal, and tree species.

The SPI is designed to support biodiversity assessment and conservation decision making. The SPI is a flexible tool that can be adapted to be partly or fully informed by regionally held data, and it can be adapted to account for the management effectiveness of protected areas, where such information is available. Map of Life conducts global and national SPI values to assist biodiversity assessment and reporting. Any and all parts of this calculation, however, can be conducted sub-nationally, and underlying species or protected area information currently used in Map of Life readily updated or replaced as needed.

The SPI was developed under the auspices of the GEO Biodiversity Observation Network and part of the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership and is formally adopted in the Global Biodiversity Monitoring Framework as a component indicator for Target 3, which stipulates an increase in protected areas to achieve the Goal of "healthy and resilient populations of all species" and "reduced extinction rates".

The SPI is designed to support biodiversity assessment and conservation decision making. The SPI is a flexible tool that can be adapted to be partly or fully informed by regionally held data, and it can be adapted to account for the management effectiveness of protected areas, where such information is available. Map of Life has conducted an initial computation of global and national SPI values to assist biodiversity assessment and reporting. Any and all parts of this calculation, however, can be conducted sub-nationally, and underlying species or protected area information currently used in Map of Life readily updated or replaced as needed.

A METRIC OF

SPECIES PROTECTION

COMPONENT INDCATOR OF

TARGET 3

TAXONOMIC COVERAGE

TERRESTRIAL:

MARINE:

Reports

The 2025 Species Protection Report

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The 2024 Species Protection Report

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Media & Presentations

Methods

Protected areas

Protected area (PA) data are derived from the World Database on Protected and Conserved Areas (WDPCA). We note that for some countries, including China and India, this database only provides a portion of the actual reserve network. We followed the WDPCA's recommendations on cleaning data for calculations of global coverage and removed PAs without designated, inscribed, or established status, points without reported areas, and UNESCO-MAB Biosphere Reserves. For PAs lacking polygons and represented only as points, we created a buffer around data with the area of the buffer equal to the reported area of the PA. The PA polygons and buffered points were dissolved together, and intersected with a coastline from GADM 4.1. The results were then rasterized to a 1 km grid with values indicating percentage of PA cover in each grid cell, and then transformed to a Behrmann equal-area projection using bilinear interpolation.

Habitat-suitable range

We apply statistical models incorporating species expert ranges, habitat preferences, environmental layers, and species occurrence points to develop species habitat-suitable range maps. These maps represent the habitats within a species range boundaries where the species is most likely to inhabit and therefore provide a more accurate representation of the size and distribution of the species range.

Species-level scores

The SPI calculation is based on individual species protection scores (SPS). The SPS measures how much of a species' habitat-suitable range is currently under formal protection relative to how much conservation area we think is needed for its population to thrive.

There is no gold standard for determining how much area protection a species needs, but we can apply an intuitive rule of thumb: the rarest species with small ranges generally need the most protection, and the most widespread and common species probably need the least. In practice, many other conservation principles will also influence species persistence through time—such as population size and trends and protected area management effectiveness—but this rule of thumb is a useful proxy for setting area-based conservation targets for species. We set area targets of 100% for species with range areas less than 10,000 km2 and 15% for species with range areas greater than 250,000 km2, and use a log-linear relationship for any species in between.

The SPS is determined by how close the real protected area coverage of a species habitat-suitable range is to the target protected area coverage. So, a species with a protection target of 50% will have an SPS of 100 if at least 50% of its habitat-suitable range is under protection. A species with a protection target of 100% and a real protected area coverage of 25% will have an SPS of 25.

National SPI

A country's national terrestrial SPI is the weighted average of all terrestrial vertebrate species in the country as defined by the borders in the GADM (see Sources). A country's national marine SPI is the weighted average of all marine fish and mammal species in the country's Exclusive Economic Zone (see Sources). Species scores are weighted by stewardship, or the percent of the species range within the country's borders. An endemic species (which has all of its range within one country) will therefore have the highest stewardship weight of 1.0, whereas a species with 10% of its range in a country will have a stewardship weight of 0.1. SPI values range from 0 and 100, where a value of 50 means that on average, species are half-way to sufficient representation in protected areas. Protected area additions that improve species representation will increase SPI values.

Sources

For the latest 2025 version of the SPI:

Species Range Maps

Species Group

Source

Amphibians

IUCN (2016). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. International Union for Conservation of Nature. Accessed on January 2017. Downloaded at www.iucnredlist.org

Birds

Jetz, W., et al. (2012). The global diversity of birds in space and time. Nature, (491);444-448. doi.org/10.1038/nature11631

Mammals

Mammal Diversity Database. (2020). Mammal Diversity Database (Version 1.2) [Data set]. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4139818. Map of Life. (2021). Mammal range maps harmonised to the Mammals Diversity Database [Data set]. Map of Life. doi.org/10.48600/MOL-48VZ-P413

Marine Fishes

Kaschner, K., et al. (2019). AquaMaps Native: Predicted range maps for aquatic species. Retrieved from https://www.aquamaps.org.

Marine Mammals

Kaschner, K., et al. (2019). AquaMaps Native: Predicted range maps for aquatic species. Retrieved from https://www.aquamaps.org.

Reptiles

Roll, U. and Meiri, S. (2022). GARD 1.7 - updated global distributions for all terrestrial reptiles [Dataset]. Dryad. doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9cnp5hqmb

Trees

Guo, WY., et al. (2023) Climate change and land use threaten global hotspots of phylogenetic endemism for trees. Nat Commun 14, 6950. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-42671-y

All groups

Misc. literature and expert sources

Species Habitat Preferences

Species Group

Source

Terrestrial vertebrates

IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2025. Version 2025-2. www.iucnredlist.org. Downloaded on 2025-04-22.

Terrestrial vertebrates

Misc. literature and expert sources

Environmental Layers

Dataset

Source

Elevation

Amatulli, G., et al. (2018) A suite of global, cross-scale topographic variables for environmental and biodiversity modeling. Scientific Data (5);180040. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2018.40. Available at www.earthenv.org/topography.

Land cover

ESA. Land Cover CCI Product User Guide Version 2. Tech. Rep. (2017). Version 2022. Available at: maps.elie.ucl.ac.be/CCI/viewer/download/ESACCI-LC-Ph2-PUGv2_2.0.pdf

Tree cover

Hansen, M. C., et al. (2013) High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change. Science 342 (15 November): 850-53. Version 2023. Data available online from: glad.earthengine.app/view/global-forest-change.

Region Layers

Dataset

Source

Country boundaries

Database of Global Administrative Boundaries (GADM) version 4.1. Available online at gadm.org/data.htm.

Exclusive Economic Zones

Flanders Marine Institute (2019). Maritime Boundaries Geodatabase, version 11. Available online at www.marineregions.org/. https://doi.org/10.14284/382

Protected areas

UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (2025), Protected Planet: The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) and World Database on Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (WD-OECM) [Online], January 2025, Cambridge, UK: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN. Available at: www.protectedplanet.net.

Citations & Acknowledgements

W. Jetz, M. A. McGeoch, R. Guralnick, S. Ferrier, J. Beck, M. J. Costello, M. Fernandez, G. N. Geller, P. Keil, C. Merow, C. Meyer, F. E. Muller-Karger, H. M. Pereira, E. C. Regan, D. S. Schmeller, E. Turak (2019). Essential biodiversity variables for mapping and monitoring species populations. Nature Ecology & Evolution. 3, 539-551. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0826-1
W. Jetz, J. McGowan, D. S. Rinnan, H. P. Possingham, P. Visconti, B. O’Donnell, M. C. Londoño-Murcia (2021) Include biodiversity representation indicators in area-based conservation targets. Nature Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01620-y
Powers, R.P. & Jetz, W. (2019) Global habitat loss and extinction risk of terrestrial vertebrates under future land-use-change scenarios. Nature Climate Change, 9, 323-329. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0406-z
D. S. Rinnan, Y. Sica, A. Ranipeta, J. Wilshire, W. Jetz (2021). Multi-scale planning helps resolve global conservation needs with regional priorities. bioRxiv 2020.02.05.936047. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.05.936047
D. S. Rinnan, , G. Reygondeau, J. McGowan, V. Lam, R. Sumaila, A. Ranipeta, K. Kaschner, C. Garilao, W. L. Cheung, W. Jetz (2021). Targeted, collaborative biodiversity conservation in the global ocean can benefit fisheries economies. bioRxiv 2021.04.23.441004. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.23.441004
IPBES (2019) Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service. In: eds. E.S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Díaz and H.T. Ngo), p. 1148. IPBES Secretariat, Bonn, Germany.
Environmental Performance. "Environmental performance index." Yale University and Columbia University: New Haven, CT, USA (2018).
CBD Secretariat (2021). CBD/WG2020/3/INF/6. 24 August 2021, Montreal. https://www.cbd.int/doc/c/2397/5133/3ce87fa6c735a7bf1cafb905/wg2020-03-inf-06-en.pdf