BASQ BIRD CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

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Program

SESSION 1. Chair: Alison Russell-French, President Birds Australia

1. How much do we know? Predicting avian patch occupancy in South East Qld.
  Danielle Shanahan and Hugh Possingham, University of Queensland, Brisbane
2. Managing and conserving wader roost habitat in SEQ: local government, the forgotten link.
  Sandra Harding and David Milton, Queensland Wader Study Group, Brisbane
3. Geographic Information Systems as integrative knowledge for raptor conservation.
  Jennifer Carter, Vanessa Moscato and Neil Tindale, University of the Sunshine Coast.

SESSION 2. Chair: Margaret Cameron, Fellow, Birds Australia

1. Progress on understanding the Glossy Blacks of South-east Queensland.
  David Niland, Birds Queensland and Glossy Black Conservancy
2. The Manorina phenomenon and its importance in the subtropics.
  C. Catterall, S. Piper, H. Bower and M. Davis, School of Environment, Griffith University, Brisbane
3. Changes in bird abundances in SE Queensland.
  Judit Szabo¹, Peter Vesk², Peter Baxter¹ and Hugh Possingham¹, ¹ University of Queensland, Brisbane and ² University of Melbourne
4. Protecting the stock route network.
  Bob Sutherst¹,², Evan Cleland¹, Judit Szabo² and Grahame Rogers¹, ¹ Birds Australia Southern Queensland, ² University of Queensland

SESSION 3. Chair: Pam Dyer, Dean and Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine Coast

1. Protection and conservation of birds in South East Queensland.
  Brad Dreis and Justin Watson, Natural Solutions Environmental Consultants Pty Ltd, Brisbane
2. Birds as biodiversity flagships in the Queensland Murray-Darling Basin Region.
  Greg Ford, Queensland Murray-Darling Committee Inc., Toowoomba

Session 1  

Paper 1: Woodland Bird Diversity and Noisy Miners in Brigalow Belt Forests

Alison Howes (howes@usq.edu.au)

Australian Centre for Sustainable Catchments, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, 4350

The vegetation of Australia’s Brigalow Belt bioregion has been extensively cleared and modified to accommodate grazing and pasture production, subsequently altering habitat structure, area and connectivity. Carnarvon Station Reserve is situated in the heart of the Brigalow Belt in central Queensland and was previously run as a cattle station for 140 years. With its recent purchase by Bush Heritage Australia, a cooperative research project has commenced to investigate the effects of grazing and habitat alteration on woodland avifauna and how any impacts may be redressed with appropriate land management. Despite substantial restoration of the native flora on the property, large areas remain dominated by the highly aggressive noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala). The aim of this study was to investigate habitat and management factors related to high noisy miner abundance. A Bayesian Belief Network model was developed as a practical tool to enable prediction of noisy miner responses to changing habitat variables. There was a strong negative correlation between abundance of passerines and noisy miner abundance. Noisy miner abundance was highest in areas with little understorey, medium grazing impact, and may also be related to the abundance of lerps. As current ecological burning practices on the property thin understorey vegetation, it is possible this management approach is maintaining habitat suitability for noisy miners.

Paper 2: How Much Do We Know? Predicting avian patch occupancy in South East Queensland.

Shanahan, D.F. & Possingham, H.P. (d.shanahan@uq.edu.au)
Spatial Ecology Lab, The Ecology Centre, University of Queensland.

South East Queensland is Australia’s fastest developing region, with the human population set to almost double over the next 20 years (South East Queensland Regional plan 2005-2026). The associated continuing development poses a serious threat to the avian wildlife in the region. To ensure effective conservation planning in developing landscapes, it is critical managers have access to information on how changes in the patterns of habitat influences avian population persistence. Though landscape ecology has created many general ‘rules of thumb’, e.g. the 30% rule, these are rarely tested and applied a priori. In a seminal paper, Mac Nally and Bennett (1997, Biological Conservation 87: 147-155) cast doubt on the ability of landscape ecology theory to predict the presence of birds in habitat patches. Managers are therefore often forced to carry out long-term expensive research in every landscape to answer the same questions. We created a simple patch occupancy model based on species specific life-history traits and three simple ‘rules’ obtained from the scientific literature; these rules specify relationships between the presence of a species and three landscape variables: patch area, patch isolation, and connectivity of the landscape. The model was applied to the South East Queensland region using readily available species specific information and vegetation maps, and its accuracy was then tested by surveying 51 patches in the region. We found that this model provides reasonable predictive power for many bird species, though life-history traits such as high habitat specialisation appear to reduce predictability. This model demonstrates that current readily available knowledge and simple ‘rules of thumb’ can be useful for making informed conservation decisions without embarking on region-specific landscape scale investigations. Our study provides some hope that there are useful generalizations in landscape ecology by illustrating the relative success of this simple a priori model.

Paper 3: Managing and conserving wader roost habitat in SEQ: local government, the forgotten link

Sandra Harding and David Milton (pitta@gil.com.au)

Queensland Wader Study Group, 336 Prout Rd., Burbank Qld 4156

Local authorities throughout the East Asian-Australasian Flyway have an important role in planning the urban footprint for their subject area. Often it is local authorities where decisions are first made about the future use of a parcel land. The environmental values of shorebirds are not widely recognised as part of this level of government’s biodiversity. With development pressure, local authorities in Australia are looking to provide coastal rural land owners an option to sell or develop their land for more intensive land use and retire. High tide roost sites that are maintained under low intensity agricultural uses such as grazing become threatened by the modifications to the environment that occur under more intense human activity. Protection of shorebird roost sites can be achieved by ensuring that these sites are not zoned for residential development. However, for this to occur, local authorities need to incorporate the spatial extents of high tide roosts within their area into their planning process.

The Queensland Wader Study Group (QWSG) is involved in a project to map the extents of shorebird high tide roosts along 400 km of the Queensland coast from Tannum Sands, near Gladstone to Tin Can Bay in the southern Great Sandy Strait. Often these roost sites are under threat from encroaching residential development as more people want to live on the coastal fringe. The quiet coastal towns along the Queensland coast are favoured by people looking for lifestyle choices. However, the expansion of these once quiet towns through new residential subdivisions results in an array of problems associated with intense urban development. These include dramatically increased levels of recreational use of waterways and conversion of roost sites to residential development.

During the project, QWSG has mapped and counted 35,000 shorebirds at over 250 roost sites. Nesting habitats of resident species of shorebird have also been identified and mapped. Threats to the use of each roost site by shorebirds have been documented and included in the GIS layer that has been produced. This GIS layer will sit alongside other physical features for consideration by local authorities in their future allocation of land for development. This project has been facilitated by the Burnett Mary Regional Group for Natural Resource Management Inc (BMRG) and is for the Burnett Mary region. The project will enable each local authorities in the region to have a spatial description of the shorebird values in their local area. This will improve awareness of shorebirds, provide a practical tool for development planning and has been done at minimal cost.

Recognition of the important role of the local authorities in land use development has largely been ignored by wader groups in the Flyway. Roosting and feeding habitats in many countries are lost incrementally as a result of decisions made by local authorities. Only by engaging with the decision-makers in these authorities and providing them with the tools to increase their awareness of the locations and extent of the critical shorebird habitats that many existing roost sites can be conserved.

Paper 4: Geographic Information Systems as integrative knowledge for raptor conservation.

Jennifer Carter, Vanessa Moscato and Neil Tindale

University of the Sunshine Coast Maroochydore DC, Qld 4558

Biodiversity loss is a particular concern in rapidly transforming landscapes, where environmental planners and managers often have insufficient time and resources to gather data and assess threats to biodiversity. Keystone predators that are long-lived are particularly vulnerable to development pressures in these urbanising regions. New methodologies are required to better inform decision making about the impacts of development on species and conservation planning. This paper pilots a methodology that constructs a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) that integrates available scientific and community based data about raptors on the Sunshine Coast, and uses scenarios modelling within the required planning and policy framework to derive geographic surrogates and impact surrogates for conservation planning. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

Session 2

Paper 1: Progress in understanding the Glossy Blacks of South East Queensland

David Niland Birds Queensland and Glossy Black Conservancy

The Glossy Black Conservancy is a very interesting collection of concerned organizations in South-East Queensland, which has been more formally operating for the past three years. And it is quite significant that each of the ‘partners’ is in a strong position to take some positive action on behalf of the Cockatoos.

There are ten local government councils with experts in environmental management and public communication, three bird groups with expertise in field observation and two specialist bodies- BAAM and Griffith University with a higher level observation and assessment techniques. As well as five other organizations which are representative of interested networks around SEQ.

While there is a common concern for the future of the Glossy Blacks, some populations are fairly secure in mountain ranges to the west. But those on the coastal plains are severely threatened by encroaching urbanization.

The species is rare among birds as a large, usually quiet, confiding bird with a very restricted diet. And it’s life cycle is strongly governed by the available food trees, suitable drinking points and nesting hollows.

All of this has resulted in some very keen observers who have managed to accumulate many detailed observations on a relatively random basis. But modern databasing tools can bring meaning from this and hopefully give us direction for future observing efforts.

A good understanding of their regular habits and movements should enable us to see where protection is needed. This paper looks at sources of, and progress in assessing the data collected so far. Microsoft Access and Excel are the tools used.

Paper 2: The Manorina phenomenon and its importance in the subtropics

C. Catterall, S. Piper, H. Bower and M. Davis (c.catterall@griffith.edu.au)
School of Environment, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland 4111, Australia

Bird observers' anecdotes and recent quantitative ecological research agree that when colonies of Manorina (particularly the noisy and bell miners M. melanocephala and M. melanophrys) occupy areas of bush, this is often associated with decreases in the abundance or diversity of other birds.  Over the past decade, there has, separately, been a growing research effort aimed at finding out how birds respond to human-induced vegetation change (especially land clearing). Such studies have often unexpectedly found that situations where eucalypt vegetation occurs in small patches or as sparse trees are associated with irruptions of noisy miners. Bell miners have been widely reported to be irrupting in previously-logged moist eucalypt forests. In most cases, such miner irruptions have then been implicated as a major cause of local declines of other birds, because the miners aggressively exclude them. This is not a phenomenon that would have been predicted by conventional conservation science, which expects bird declines after vegetation change to be due to reduced population size and disrupted movement processes.  Both aspects of the miner phenomenon (miner increases in space and time, and the specific nature of their impacts on other birds) need to be better understood, as a basis for management of vegetation and biodiversity.  In this presentation we consider relevant information from the east Australian subtropics.

Paper 3: Changes in bird abundances in southeast Queensland

Szabo, Judit K. 1, Vesk, Peter 2, Baxter, Peter 1 and Hugh Possingham 1

1 The Spatial Ecology Lab, University of Queensland

2 School of Botany, University of Melbourne

There are concerns about native birds declining Australia-wide. However, the lack of systematically collected long-term data makes the detection of trends in bird abundances difficult. Species lists are probably the most common form of biodiversity information available. As a minimum, lists confer two types of information, the list of species present and the number of species recorded (i.e. list length). The problem with lists is that the sampling effort is unknown: they could infer results from different sampling areas and times. Franklin introduced a novel method in 1999 that uses list length as a proxy for collection effort. He proposed that even though lists have significant shortcomings as data, they may have potential to infer changes in species abundance and distributions (i.e. if a species is declining, it has less probability of appearing on lists of the same length). We adapted Franklin’s method and applied it to 40 years of volunteer-collected Birds Queensland data from southeast Queensland. We used a Bayesian approach to model the probability of a species occurring on a list as a function of the list length and the year of the observation. List Length Analysis could be performed in maximum likelihood framework, but the Bayesian approach is flexible and allows intuitive interpretations such as the probability of a decline. From the analysis of 257 species we conclude that List Length Analysis is useful to model relative abundances from species lists, as we were able to detect declines and increases, and estimating the magnitude and certainty of those changes was straightforward. Further, we can calculate the probability that there has been a decline of a given magnitude, without recourse to future data. We call attention to increasers (urban birds, parrots and waterfowl) and decliners (cuckoos, shorebirds and kingfishers) in the greater Brisbane area.

Paper 4:Protecting the Stock Route Network

Bob Sutherst¹ י ² , Evan Cleland¹, Judit Szabo² י ³ and Grahame Rogers¹ ¹ Birds Australia Southern Queensland ² University of Queensland ³ Applied Environmental Decision Analysis Hub

The stock routes were established to provide corridors for walking livestock to markets and between properties in Australia. To provide sufficient feed and water, they were managed conservatively and now contain much healthier native vegetation than adjoining areas. These corridors carry many more birds than grazing or cropping land and extend over 72,000 km in Queensland. They used to represent 5% of the area of NSW but many stock routes have been sold in the last decade. Loss of the stock routes will be a serious blow to native vegetation and wildlife as the flora and fauna attempt to track changing climates with climate change.

There is considerable urgency to protect the stock routes because governments are pressing to ‘rationalise’ the networks to reduce operating costs because the numbers of livestock using the routes has declined with heavy road transport. We believe that the biodiversity values of the SRN/TSR warrant environmental funding. We review the progress in the development of a ‘stock route coalition’ of NGOs and industry stakeholders and outline future plans.

Session 3

Paper 1: Protection and conservation of birds in SE Queensland

Brad Dreis and Dr Justin Watson, Natural Solutions, Environmental Consultants Pty Ltd Brisbane

South-east Queensland (SEQ) is home to a large diversity of ecosystems including Eucalypt woodlands and open-forests, internationally significant wetlands and a variety of rainforest types. These ecosystems provide habitat for over 450 native and 12 introduced bird species (EPA, 2008). Given that 830 bird species are known to occur in Australia (BA, 2008), over half of Australia avifauna occur, or have been recorded, in SEQ.

Despite this statistic, human settlement and expansion in SEQ has resulted in broad-scale clearing of vegetation and bird habitat. This has resulted in pressure on avifauna within the bioregion and has caused the local extinction of numerous bird species. Many other species are currently considered vulnerable to extinction with 56 species that have been recorded within SEQ having a threatened status under state and/or national legislation (EPA, 2008).

Legislative and statutory mechanisms to protect wildlife occur at three levels in SEQ: Federal, State and Local. The Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC) is Australia’s principal environmental legislation which came into force on 16 July 2000. The EPBC aims to conserve Australia’s biodiversity and protect Matters of National Environmental Significance though a rigorous environmental assessment and approvals process.

There are several legislative measures in Queensland that aim to protect biodiversity, both directly and indirectly. The two primary legislative tools are the Nature Conservation Act 1992 (NCA) and Vegetation Management Act 1999 (VMA). The NCA aims to protect nature and in particular those species which are considered to be endangered, vulnerable or rare in Queensland. The VMA protects fauna habitat by regulating the clearing of remnant vegetation throughout Queensland.

The third level of protection is administered by local governments in SEQ. This is achieved through planning assessment codes such as biodiversity and nature conservation codes, schedules of threatened or locally significant species as well as mapping of areas with significant conservation and biodiversity values.

Biodiversity may be mitigated from development impacts in a number of ways. In particular, areas of high biodiversity and conservation values, such as habitat for threatened species, may be retained and rehabilitated. Suitable buffers to protect these areas and/or sensitive ecological features such as waterways, habitat trees and roosts from development impacts are also utilised. Management plans, including revegetation and rehabilitation, to maintain and monitor viable populations of fauna in development areas are commonly used.

Paper 2: Birds as biodiversity flagships in the Queensland Murray-Darling Basin Region

Greg Ford

Queensland Murray-Darling Committee Inc., Toowoomba

The Queensland Murray-Darling Basin (QMDB) spans a vast area of inland southern Queensland, from the Great Dividing Range in the east to the Paroo River system in the semi-arid west. The Queensland Murray-Darling Committee (QMDC) delivers education, capacity building, research and on-ground conservation outcomes for about one-third of this region - the Border Rivers (BR) and Maranoa-Balonne (MB) Catchments.

The BR and MB catchments are home to around 400 species of birds, including at least 20 rare or threatened species. Some parts of the region are considered a stronghold for declining woodland bird species like the Diamond Firetail, Brown Treecreeper and Hooded Robin.

Despite the diversity of birds and populations of threatened and declining species in the region, our birds are far from secure in terms of long term conservation needs. While broad-scale clearing has ceased in the region, the devastation previously caused to bird habitats will have significant long-term effects on the stability and viability of populations. Furthermore, ongoing management of remnant and regrowth vegetation in the region requires major changes to shore up what habitat is left and ensure new and connective habitat is encouraged to persist.

To this end, the birds themselves have become an important tool in promoting awareness of biodiversity issues to the regional community. That birds are highly visible and (usually) highly audible makes them ideal flagships for biodiversity conservation in the region. Their well-researched responses to landscape change further enhance the appeal of birds as indicators of biodiversity condition.

QMDC, in association with Birds Australia, Landcare and other community and industry groups have successfully adopted and utilised birds in a variety of education, training and capacity building programs in recent years. An overview of the products and services thus developed will be presented.

Thanks to our sponsor.