Australian threatened birds for which the risk of extinction declined between 1990 and 2020

ABSTRACT

Reducing extinction risk is a common aim of threatened species management. However, over the period 1990 to 2020, extinction risk was recently assessed as having declined in only 25 out of the 199 Australian bird taxa eligible for assessment. Here we analyse patterns that emerge from these taxa. Some of these improvements may be only temporary; the extinction risk of three taxa increased after it had initially declined. Invasive predator control on islands was the conservation intervention with greatest impact, benefitting 13 taxa (with nine of these from Macquarie Island). For four taxa, intensive management was the primary driver of reduced risk. Another four benefited from habitat protection and one from law enforcement. For seven taxa, conservation actions had no discernible effect; for two albatrosses a shift in fishing patterns may have reduced bycatch, for one, losses on the mainland meant that most birds now persist only in a stable island population and, for four taxa, reasons for changes in population trend are unknown. Never was there only one driver of reduced extinction risk with most taxa benefitting from at least five drivers. Macquarie Island was the only geographic cluster of taxa; there was little overlap among other taxa. Although the number of improvements is small, our results demonstrate that reduced extinction risk can be achieved with the right combination of targeted actions and, in some cases, serendipity. However, due to insufficient data, our ability to predict accurately the drivers of, or changes in, extinction risk for most species remains poor.

POL ICY HIG HLIG HTS

• Reductions in extinction risk are rare but achievable.

• Up to ten different factors contributed to reduced extinction risk in a taxon; there were rarely fewer than five.

• Extinction risk reduction had no geographical focus apart from the cluster of taxa on Macquarie Island.

• There is currently no widely accepted approach to classifying the many ways in which extinction risk can be reduced.

• Over a quarter of risk reduction examples were not the result of conservation interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• IUCN red list
• downlisting
• protected areas
• species management

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the many people who have contributed to reducing the extinction risk to Australian birds, particularly the many ‘champions’ of threatened birds who have devoted many decades of their lives to keeping Australia’s avian heritage for future generations. We also wish to thank contributors to Garnett and Baker (2021) on whose knowledge the current paper is based. Funding for the work was received from the Australian Bird Environment Fund, BirdLife Australia, Charles Darwin University, Biosis Pty Ltd, and Auchmeddan. The lead author also wishes to acknowledge the support of the Greenhouse, Groove and Porkin cafes during creation of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All data are provided in the Supplementary tables.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/01584197.2023.2291140.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Bird Environment Fund, BirdLife Australia, Charles Darwin University, Biosis Pty Ltd and Auchmeddan. We would also like to thank the perceptive, but anonymous, reviewers of the manuscript.