A bird occupancy estimator for land practitioners in the NSW South Western Slopes bioregion

Abstract

Biodiversity loss is a major issue internationally and within Australia, with major restoration efforts to recover native biota focussing on agricultural landscapes. We introduce a free new webtool, BirdCast [https://sustfarm. shinyapps.io/BirdCast/], for estimating the primarily native bird biodiversity in Box Gum Grassy Woodlands within the NSW South Western Slopes bioregion. The tool has potential to demonstrate farm-scale bird biodiversity dividends generated from past and future investments in vegetation management and restoration programmes. BirdCast incorporates 60 of the most commonly encountered bird species and includes visualisations, data export and summary reports for printing. It is underpinned by a large jointspecies distribution model fitted to 17 years of empirical data.

How Wide, How Much? A Framework for Quantifying Economic and Ecological Trade-Offs of Altering Riparian Width on Agricultural Land

“…The RQM is competitive with other quantification tools such as inVEST (Sharp et al, 2014), LOOC-C (CSIRO, 2020) and BirdCast (Hingee et al, 2022)…”

“…This factor is common to many models, in that their design orientation around specific quantification elements limits them to be more detailed in their assessment but reduces use-cases to single-function analyses. BirdCast, that estimates avian occurrence from revegetation works in east Australia, is another example of this practice (Hingee et al, 2022). The RQM is multifunctional; it can be used as a carbon sequestration predictor that simultaneously informs users on the economic impact, or it can be used in a revegetation cost analysis that also directs to relevant planting lists, among other uses.…”

Climate and Biodiversity Credentials for Australian Grass-Fed Beef: A Review of Standards, Certification and Assurance Schemes

“…The contribution of habitat in a specified area to supporting nationally listed threatened species is estimated by combining information on the spatial distribution of threatened species with data on habitat condition. The locations in which nationally listed threatened species may occur, given a suitable habitat, were taken from the Species of National Environmental Significance database [206].…”

The business of biodiversity – What is needed for biodiversity markets to work

“…see Keith et al 2017). Good quality biodiversity monitoring also can be the foundation of environmental prediction systems that, for instance, may be used to forecast future biodiversity dividends from interventions such as site, farm and landscape-level revegetation programmes, as has recently been done using 20 years of bird data from restoration efforts in the temperate woodlands of south-eastern Australia (Hingee et al 2022). These data-derived predictive tools can allow farmers and other natural resource managers to determine how much restoration work, and hence how much overall vegetation cover, will be needed to reach a particular target for biodiversity (Hingee et al 2022), such as a target that might be required for payments under a biodiversity stewardship programme or a certification scheme.…”

“…These data‐derived predictive tools can allow farmers and other natural resource managers to determine how much restoration work, and hence how much overall vegetation cover, will be needed to reach a particular target for biodiversity (Hingee et al . 2022), such as a target that might be required for payments under a biodiversity stewardship programme or a certification scheme.…”