Résumé
Seabirds are currently among the most threatened groups of birds in the world and their conservation status has deteriorated rapidly in recent decades. One of the main threats is the degradation of their breeding habitats as a result of increasing anthropogenic pressures on the coastline and on islands. While being essential for the life cycle of many species, the Caribbean region as a whole, and Cuba in particular (48% of this region's emerging lands), has among the lowest proportion of protected areas in the world. However, pressures from climate change (hurricanes) and anthropogenic activities (tourism, fishing, trade, renewable energies) are increasing. Moreover, the gradual opening of Cuba to foreign investment could trigger a genuine explosion of human activities in the coming years. Here we implemented systematic reserve site selection algorithms to identify areas to prioritize for the conservation of the Laridae colonies in Cuba considering four of the more important human pressures in the country: marine-coastal tourism, fishing, wind farms and nightlight contamination. The global cost function used to identify the conservation areas is a weighted sum of these specific human pressures. Several conservation scenarios were tested by setting different protection targets of the considered conservation features (e.g. number of colonies, threatened species, breeding habitat suitability), as well as different weights of the human pressure in the global cost function. A future conservation scenario was also modeled taking into account the wind turbine development plan of Cuba. Finally, the selected conservation areas priorities were compared with the current national system of marine protected areas to highlight shortages and conservation needs in the face of the existing development plans in Cuba.