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Bridging the divide between pure and practical science is an age-old challenge in all disciplines, but in biodiversity conservation at least, the prospect of better integration between science, policy and practice is an increasingly realistic one. On 21 December 2010, the United Nations 65th General Assembly agreed to establish an Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), to tighten the interface between academia and application in the field of nature conservation (Mooney & Mace, 2009; see http://www.ipbes.net). While the mechanisms by which IPBES operates have yet to be finalized, and while vigilance will be essential to ensure that the platform builds from existing initiatives rather than duplicating efforts and spreading scarce resources even more thinly, the potential for guiding science towards tackling the most pressing questions while infusing cutting-edge research into policy and practice is invigorating. In this issue, Beresford et al. (2010) provide a powerful example of the value of such an interface between science, policy and practice. On the one hand, their analysis of the coverage of threatened African bird distributions by protected areas advances pure biodiversity science in a number of important ways. On the other, it stands to inform a number of conservation applications in Africa and beyond. Here, we highlight four of the most important of these directions and implications.