BirdHealth Index

Project Aim

This project aims to define community condition metrics for Australia’s bird communities, with a view to tracking change in condition over time. We are asking researchers, managers, twitchers, and birdos who are familiar with these bird communities to score their condition based on the results of 2-ha 20-min surveys. We will then explore which attributes (how many species, which species, how abundant are they) correspond to your condition scores and use this information to create BirdHealth indices for each community.

What are we asking you to do?

We will ask you a series of questions in an online survey. For each bird community, the surveys will show you a series of species lists from 25 2-ha 20-minute bird surveys out of BirdLife Australia’s Birdata database. For each survey, we will ask you to estimate the condition of the bird community that the survey represents on a scale of 0-100 based on your personal experience. When doing this we ask that you assume that all bird surveys were conducted in the last 10 years, by experienced birders, in non-urban environments, at an appropriate time of day, and in appropriate weather conditions. At the end of the survey, you will be asked about the attributes that you considered when generating your condition scores. Each survey should take around half an hour to complete.

Find out more

Frequently Asked Questions

If you have any additional questions please contact us at m.maron@uq.edu.au

Access surveys here

We will be releasing surveys for different communities in stages. Each survey includes a full description of the bird community and its distribution. For now, the communities that are available for assessment are: