Surfbirds News

Birds Australia (BirdLife in Australia) has published Australia’s Important Bird Areas, a major contribution to conservation planning in a country where the sheer scale of the landscape has held back the identification of sites of high importance for biodiversity conservation.

Mangrove Honeyeater © Jon Coleman, from the surfbirds galleries.

Between 2005 and 2009, with contributions from over 1,000 volunteers and funding from Rio Tinto, the IBA project designated 314 Australian sites of global significance for bird conservation. These sites encompass almost 44 million hectares of land, which include IBAs in all Australian States and most Territories. But almost half of the area covered by Australia’s IBAs has no existing formal protection.

The Australian Government aims to reserve at least 10% of all bioregions, and to protect key habitats for nationally listed threatened species and migratory species. Although more than 9,000 formally protected areas cover 11% of the Australian landmass, many bioregions are under-represented, and many threatened and migratory species are poorly protected. Moreover, even in Protected Areas some species are declining. This highlights the need for conservation in the almost 90% of Australia’s landmass that is outside the formal conservation estate.

“In countries such as the United Kingdom, all sites of conservation significance have been identified”, Graeme Hamilton explained. “Until now, the scale of the task and the inadequacy of baseline distributional data have discouraged such projects in Australia, and the lack of mapped priority areas, especially those off-reserve, has been a hindrance to effective and cost-efficient conservation. The IBA project is the first national site-scale conservation analysis for the country.”

Many of Australia’s small islands support large concentrations of nesting seabirds, especially on the Great Barrier Reef and around Tasmania. Some of these seabird colonies and IBAs are very small: 20 IBAs are less than one hectare in size.

At the other extreme, some IBAs have been designated for species that occur at low population densities over very large areas. These include the South-west Slopes IBA for breeding Superb Parrots Polytelis swainsonii, and Arnhem Plateau IBA for White-throated Grasswrens Amytornis woodwardi, both Vulnerable.

A number of Australian birds, such as Endangered Mallee Emuwren Stipiturus mallee are endemic to low, fire-sensitive vegetation such as mallee (important in 22 IBAs) or heathland (11 IBAs). Appropriate fire management is critical if these IBAs are to keep their value. At the wetter end of the scale, the designation of IBAs is triggered by rainforest species (28 IBAs) or specialist mangrove species such as Chestnut Rail Eulabeornis castaneoventris or Mangrove Honeyeater Lichenostomus fasciogularis (17 IBAs). For the birds that inhabit these IBAs, climate change is now the biggest threat.

To read the State of Australia’s Birds report, please click here.