La Trobe

Benefits of Modelling Abundance for Rare Species Conservation: A Case Study With Multiple Birds Across One Million Hectares

journal contribution
posted on 2025-01-30, 04:39 authored by Simon VerdonSimon Verdon, Rhys MakdissiRhys Makdissi, William MitchellWilliam Mitchell, Rebecca L Boulton, James RadfordJames Radford

Aim: Many management programs that are based on the needs of rare or threatened species are ineffective because they fail to collect enough data to reliably estimate abundance and map distributions for their target species. Information that does exist for rare species is often based on presence‐only data, because it is difficult to collect sufficient data on abundance for such species. We targeted 10 rare bird species that were excluded from a recent study due to insufficient data. For these species, we aimed to (a) collect sufficient abundance data, (b) identify important locations and (c) estimate population sizes. Location: A large reserve system (~1 M‐ha) in south‐eastern Australia. Methods: We undertook intensive field surveys, using repeat area searches of 660 independent 25‐ha sites, totalling 2640 hours of surveys (2‐h surveys; two surveys per site). We used N‐mixture models to estimate abundance whilst accounting for imperfect detection. Results: This survey effort returned enough high‐quality data on nine rare bird species to identify important locations and estimate their population sizes. To illustrate potential applications of mapped important locations, we used our results to assess the likely impact of a planned burn program in part of the study region. We identified planned burns that are likely to have a significant impact on important locations for rare species that may not have otherwise been identified. Populations were generally larger than previously estimated using expert opinion. For example, our population estimate for the threatened Red‐lored Whistler (Pachycephala rufogularis) was ~16 times larger than the previous estimate. Main Conclusions: Our results show (a) the benefits of using abundance to identify important locations for rare species, (b) the value of developing bespoke survey methods for estimating abundance of rare species with low detectability and (c) a pathway for the application of mapped important locations in conservation land management.

Funding

This project was supported by the Mallee Catchment Management Authority, through joint funding from the Australian Government's Environment Restoration Fund, the National Landcare Program, Murraylands and Riverland Landscape Board, Department for Environment and Water, Government of South Australia and La Trobe University, with additional funding from Zoos Victoria.

History

Publication Date

2025-01-18

Journal

Diversity and Distributions

Volume

31

Issue

1

Article Number

e13956

Pagination

18p.

Publisher

Wiley

ISSN

1366-9516

Rights Statement

© 2025 The Author(s). Diversity and Distributions published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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