Identifying Important Bird Areas (IBAs), and ensuring their long-term protection, cannot be achieved without detailed information of the bird populations occurring within them. This was highlighted by a study published this month in BirdLife?s journal Bird Conservation International. The authors produced new data from Kazakhstan highlighting the importance of land surrounding the protected Korgalzhynskiy nature reserve[1]. This new information has been used to include the wider area in a new inventory of IBAs in Central Asia, which identifies 124 IBAs covering more than 16,000,000 ha in Kazakhstan alone.