Shifting boundaries: taxonomy and site based conservation

In our article, we show that a fundamental taxonomic revision of an entire Class of vertebrates (birds), which increased the number of recognized species by over 10%, did not lead to an increase in average extinction risk nor did we find a decline in the effectiveness (in terms of range capture) of existing protected areas or Important Birds and Biodiversity areas (Simkins et al., 2020). Our analyses are made even more timely by growing calls for standardized taxonomies(Garnett et al., 2020). We thank Moran-Ordonez (2020) and Garnett & Thomson (2020) for their interesting and thoughtful commentaries on this article, and having split their comments into two sections, taxonomy and site-based conservation, we respond to each in turn.