Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs), initially known as Important Bird Areas, are key sites for the conservation of bird species, identified through the BirdLife International IBA programme since 1980s. These sites are small enough to be conserved in their entirety, often form part of a Protected-Area network, and are, as far as possible, different in character or habitat or ornithological importance from the surrounding area. IBAs are well established and recognised as sites of very high biodiversity value and are therefore priorities for conservation attention. The identification of IBAs is based on a set of internationally agreed, standardised criteria. Inventories of IBAs have now been produced for many of the terrestrial, freshwater and marine regions of the world. In 2013 IBAs were renamed from “Important Bird Areas” to “Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas”, to reflect their importance for other species. There are globally over 12,000 sites in more than 200 countries, territories and autonomous regions. IBAs cover terrestrial, marine and freshwater regions. The identification of IBAs is an ongoing process, which involves Birdlife International as well as Birdlife Partners (nationally or regionally-based NGOs which collaborate with Birdlife). When complete, the global network is expected to comprise around 15,000 IBAs covering 7% of the world’s land surface.

In Syria, since the nineties of the last century (1992), the Syrian IBA’s were first listed through the specialized study (Evans, 1994). This identified 24 sites to be as the national IBAs according to Birdlife Criteria with a combined area of 6,300 km² or about 3.5 percent of the country’s area. These are listed in the following Table:

While partial work took place at some major IBAs in Syria, the majority of those IBAs were not fully visited since then and were only briefly assessed in 2012 in an exercise that was carried out by SSCW.