Trends in monitoring of Australia’s threatened birds (1990–2020): much improved but still inadequate

ABSTRACT

Monitoring is vital to conservation, enabling conservation scientists to detect population declines, identify threats and measure the effectiveness of interventions. However, not all threatened taxa are monitored, monitoring quality is variable, and the various components of monitoring are likely to differ in their rates of improvement over time. We assessed the presence of monitoring and monitoring quality, using a range of metrics, for all Australia’s threatened bird taxa from 1990 to 2020 (four assessments spanning 30 years). We used our assessments to understand decadal trends in the number of taxa monitored; monitoring quality; and the groups that conduct monitoring. The monitoring of Australia’s threatened birds has increased substantially since 1990, from 19% of taxa to 75% in 2020. Monitoring quality has also improved, with 24.1% of taxa assessed overall as ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’ in 2020 (up from 4.8% in 1990). However, by 2020, most monitoring programmes still scored poorly for Data availability/reporting, Management linkage, Demographic data and Training/succession planning. In 2020, private individuals and governments accounted for 59% of monitoring contributions, with the greatest number of taxa monitored by private individuals (79 of 166 taxa assessed). Despite improvements in monitoring since 1990, only a minority of taxa had high-quality monitoring in the most recent assessment period. Monitoring is a powerful tool in conservation, justifying investment in improving how it is conducted. We draw on our results and examples of high-quality monitoring programmes to develop a set of priority actions to improve monitoring of Australia’s threatened birds.

KE Y POL ICY HIG HLIG HTS

• Although monitoring of Australia’s threatened birds has improved greatly over the last 30 years, most-threatened bird taxa still have inadequate monitoring and systemic changes are required to improve monitoring quality on the scale required.

• We recommend priority actions to improve monitoring including funding reforms, targeted improvements of poor performing monitoring components and actions to boost some of the current strengths in monitoring programmes.

• Private individuals conduct monitoring for more taxa than any other group, so boosting the quality of their monitoring is especially important.

KEYWORDS:

• Biodiversity conservation
• Birdata
• citizen science
• conservation funding
• eBird
• monitoring adequacy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the many thousands of people who have been contributing to the monitoring of Australian birds over the last 30 years. We would also like to acknowledge those who contributed to the Action Plan for Australian Birds especially Roanne Ramsey and Isabel Ely for their administration work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All data is included in Supplementary Material: https://doi.org/10.1080/01584197.2023.2275121.

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/01584197.2023.2275121.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support for that project was received from the Australian Bird Environment Fund, BirdLife Australia, Charles Darwin University, Biosis Pty Ltd, Auchmeddan and the Wettenhall Environment Trust.