Estimating the population sizes of rainforest birds of the Tweed Caldera

Elliot C. Leach, Chris J. Burwell, Richard G. Sharpe, Darryl N. Jones, Roger L. Kitching
pp. 119-125


Abstract

Climate change is likely to negatively impact populations of rainforest birds along Australia’s eastern seaboard. To this end, accurate estimations of species’ current population sizes are necessary for future monitoring and conservation. Here, we used distance sampling protocols to generate abundance and density estimates for 11 species of birds occupying the Gondwanan rainforests of the Tweed Caldera on the Queensland–New South Wales border. Data were collected along two elevational gradients in subtropical rainforest between September 2015 and October 2016. Half-normal functions with cosine adjustments were used to calculate the density of each species per km2. We used a GIS to determine the total area of suitable habitat available in protected areas adjacent to the sampling locations (~425 km2) and then extrapolated the density estimates to generate estimates of population size for each target species in the study area. Estimated population sizes ranged from 473 719 (Yellow-throated Scrubwren Sericornis citreogularis) to 21 841 (White-throated Treecreeper Cormobates leucophaea). The standard error (SE) associated with the population estimate of the White-throated Treecreeper was large, as was the SE associated with the Eastern Yellow Robin Eopsaltria australis (estimated population 235 084), Green Catbird Ailuroedus crassirostris (69 731) and Grey Fantail Rhipidura fuliginosa (124 534). Accurate abundance estimates (SE <20% of total abundance) were obtained for the Brown Gerygone Gerygone mouki (193 919), Brown Thornbill Acanthiza pusilla (198 801), Golden Whistler Pachycephala pectoralis (72 730), Lewin’s Honeyeater Meliphaga lewinii (190 389), Silvereye Zosterops lateralis
(92 268), White-browed Scrubwren Sericornis frontalis (94 426) and Yellow throated Scrubwren (473 719). Species specific surveys would provide more accurate results, but given the declines expected for many species in the region, and the current lack of estimates of population sizes in these protected areas, the baseline data presented here are of importance from ecological and conservation perspectives.


References


Anderson, A.S. (2011). Influences of the Past, Present and Future Climate on the Structure and Diversity of Rainforest Bird Assemblages in North-eastern Australia. PhD thesis. James Cook University, Townsville, Qld.

 

Barrett, G., Silcocks, A., Barry, S., Cunningham, R. & Poulter, R. (2003). The New Atlas of Australian Birds. Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, Melbourne.

 

BirdLife Australia (2015). The State of Australia’s Birds 2015: Headline Trends for Terrestrial Birds. BirdLife Australia, Melbourne.

 

BirdLife International (2017). Important Bird Areas Factsheet: Scenic Rim. Available online: http://datazone.birdlife.org/site/factsheet/24332 (retrieved 12 December 2017).

 

Buckland, S.T., Anderson, D.R., Burnham, K.P. & Laake, J.L. (2005). Distance sampling. In: Armitrage, P. & Colton, T. (Eds). Encyclopedia of Biostatistics, Volume 2, pp. 1488–1493. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, West Sussex, UK.

 

Celis-Murillo, A., Deppe, J.L. & Allen, M.F. (2009). Using soundscape recordings to estimate bird species abundance, richness, and composition. Journal of Field Ornithology 80, 64–78.

 

Darras, K., Furnas, B., Fitriawan, I., Mulyani, Y. & Tscharntke, T. (2018). Estimating bird detection distances in sound recordings for standardising detection ranges and distance sampling. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 9, 1928–1938 .

 

Date, E.M., Ford, H.A. & Recher, H.F. (1991). Frugivorous pigeons, stepping stones, and weeds in northern New South Wales. In: Saunders, D.A. & Hobbs, R.J. (Eds.) Nature Conservation 2: The Role of Corridors, pp. 241–245. Surrey Beatty & Sons, Sydney.

 

Date, E.M., Recher, H.F., Ford, H.A & Stewart, D.A. (1996). The conservation and ecology of rainforest pigeons in northeastern New South Wales. Pacific Conservation Biology 2, 299–308.

 

Ford, H.A. (2011). The causes of decline of birds of eucalypt woodlands: Advances in our knowledge over the last 10 years. Emu 111, 1–9.

 

Freeman, B.G. & Class Freeman, A.M. (2014). Rapid upslope shifts in New Guinean birds illustrate strong distributional responses of tropical montane species to global warming. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, 4490–4494.

 

Frommolt, K.-H. (2017). Information obtained from long-term acoustic recordings: Applying bioacoustic techniques for monitoring wetland birds during breeding season. Journal of Ornithology 158, 659–668.

 

Gaston, K.J. (2008). Biodiversity and extinction: The importance of being common. Progress in Physical Geography 32, 73-79.

 

Gaston, K.J. (2010). Valuing common species. Science 327, 154–155.

 

Hedley, R.W., Huang, Y. & Yao, K. (2017). Direction-of-arrival estimation of animal vocalizations for monitoring animal behavior and improving estimates of abundance. Avian Conservation and Ecology 12, 6.

 

Inger, R., Gregory, R., Duffy, J.P., Stott, I., VoÅ™íšek, P. & Gaston, K.J. (2015). Common European birds are declining rapidly while less abundant species’ numbers are rising. Ecology Letters 18, 28–36.

 

Kikkawa, J. (2002). Biogeographic patterns of avian diversity in Australia. In: Abe, T., Levin, S.A. & Higashi, M. (Eds). Biodiversity: An Ecological Perspective, pp. 9–20. Springer-Verlag, New York.

 

Kitching, R.L., Braithwaite, R. & Cavanaugh, J. (2010). The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia - Introduction. In: Kitching, R.L., Braithwaite, R. & Cavanaugh, J. (Eds). Remnants of Gondwana: A Natural and Social History of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, pp. 1–6. Surrey Beatty & Sons, Sydney.

 

Laurance, W.F., Dell, B., Turton, S.M., Lawes, M.J., Hutley, L.B., McCallum, H., Dale, P., Bird, M., Hardy, G., Prideaux, G., Gawne, B., McMahon, C.R., Yu, R., Hero, J.-M., Schwarzkopf, L., Krockenberger, A., Douglas, M., Silvester, E., Mahony, M., Vella, K., Saikia, U., Wahren, C.-H., Xu, Z., Smith, B. & Cocklin, C. (2011). The 10 Australian ecosystems most vulnerable to tipping points. Biological Conservation 144, 1472–1480.

 

Leach, E.C. (2016). Notes on the Zoothera thrushes in the Tweed Range of north-eastern New South Wales. Australian Field Ornithology 33, 240–243.

 

Leach, E.C., Burwell, C.J., Jones, D.N. & Kitching, R.L. (2018a). Modelling the responses of Australian subtropical rainforest birds to changes in environmental conditions along elevational gradients. Austral Ecology 43, 490–501.

 

Leach, E.C., Burwell, C.J., Jones, D.N. & Kitching, R.L. (2018b). Identifying avian indicators of elevation in the Gondwanan Rainforests of Australia. Pacific Conservation Biology, https://doi.org/10.1071/pc 18039.

 

Mace, G.M., Collar, N.J., Gaston, K.J., Hilton-Taylor, C., Akçakaya, H.R., Leader-Williams, N., Milner-Gulland, E.J. & Stuart, S.N. (2008). Quantification of extinction risk: IUCN’s system for classifying threatened species. Conservation Biology 22, 1424–1442.

 

McDonald, B. (2010). The Tweed Caldera Group. In: Kitching, R.L., Braithwaite, R. & Cavanaugh, J. (Eds). Remnants of Gondwana: A Natural and Social History of the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia, pp. 39–50. Surrey Beatty & Sons, Sydney.

 

Newson, S.E., Evans, K.L., Noble, D.G., Greenwood, J.J.D. & Gaston, K.J. (2008). Use of distance sampling to improve estimates of national population sizes for common and widespread breeding birds in the UK. Journal of Applied Ecology 45, 1330–1338.

 

Pattemore, V. & Kikkawa, J. (1974). Comparison of bird populations in logged and unlogged rain forest at Wiangarie State Forest, N.S.W. Australian Forestry 37, 188–198.

 

Pulsford, I., Howling, G., Dunn, R. & Crane, R. (2013). The Great Eastern Ranges Initiative: A continental scale lifeline connecting people and nature. In: Fitzsimons, J., Pulsford, I. & Wescott, G. (Eds). Linking Australia’s Landscapes: Lessons and Opportunities from Large-scale Conservation Networks, pp. 123–134. CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.

 

R Core Team (2017). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Available online: http://www.R-project.org/ (retrieved 1 January 2017).

 

Recher, H.F. (1989). Counting terrestrial birds: use and application of census procedures in Australia. Australian Zoological Reviews 1, 25–45.

 

Sebastián-González, E., Pang-Ching, J., Barbosa, J.M. & Hart, P. (2015). Bioacoustics for species management: Two case studies with a Hawaiian forest bird. Ecology and Evolution 5, 4696–4705.

 

Shoo, L.P., Anderson, A. & Williams, S.E. (2009). On the isolated population of Lewin’s Honeyeater (Meliphaga lewinii amphochlora) from the McIlwraith Range uplands, Cape York Peninsula, Australia: estimates of population size and distribution. Emu 109, 288–293.

 

Shoo, L.P., Williams, S.E. & Hero, J.-M. (2005). Climate warming and the rainforest birds of the Australian Wet Tropics: Using abundance data as a sensitive predictor of change in total population size. Biological Conservation 125, 335–343.

 

Shoo, L.P., Williams, S.E. & Hero, J.-M. (2006). Detecting climate change induced range shifts: Where and how should we be looking? Austral Ecology 31, 22–29.

 

Thomas, L., Buckland, S.T., Rexstad, E.A., Laake, J.L., Strindberg, S., Hedley, S.L., Bishop, J.R.B., Marques, T.A. & Burnham, K.P. (2010). Distance software: Design and analysis of distance sampling surveys for estimating population size. Journal of Applied Ecology 47, 5–14.

 

Williams, S.E., Bolitho, E.E. & Fox, S. (2003). Climate change in Australian tropical rainforests: An impending environmental catastrophe. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 270, 1887–1892.