Adventures in Western Australia and at the Aust. Ornithological Congress

By Natalee Bozzi

Natalee finding birds in Western Australia

The AOC 2025 in Perth was a blast! It was fun to be in a room with a bunch of other bird people, and to actually talk to the authors of papers I’ve spent the last several months reading.

I was very excited to present work I’ve done in conjunction with my colleagues in the RARES group at UQ, presenting “An assessment of how accurately we are classifying the extinction risk of Australia’s birds,” and enjoyed talking with representatives from Birdlife Australia afterwards about my research and the next steps moving forward.

I was very interested to hear about the recent advancements in acoustic surveying, and also had a great time hearing about the work done by other researchers at UQ, such as the presentation on Letter-winged Kites by Lucy Coleman and Jonathan Mills-Anderson’s presentation on identifying Australian bird communities.

Natalee's presentation at AOC

After the conference I embarked on a whirlwind birding road trip with friends to see WA’s endemic birds; we birded around Perth, then Esperance, Albany (and Cheynes Beach), and then drove 17 hours north to the Pilbara! The best bird was easily Grey Honeyeater, one of the holy grails of Australian birding! We also lucked out with mammals, and ended the trip with a confiding numbat at Dryandra Woodland National Park.

AOC Talk abstract: An assessment of how accurately we are classifying the extinction risk of Australia’s birds

Our entire conservation and recovery system is driven by the extinction risk classification

framework; whether a species receives conservation attention is fully dependent upon that species' extinction risk classification. Furthermore, the level of conservation attention a species receives is contingent on that classification; a species at greater risk of extinction will generally receive more funding and on-ground action than a species at lower risk of extinction. As the guiding framework for everyone working within the conservation ecosystem, from conservation policy-makers and decision-makers, through to researchers and on-ground managers, confidence in this risk classification system is imperative. But what if that framework is not as robust as we think?

Our analysis of the risk assessments for Australia's birds over the past three assessment cycles (2000, 2010, and 2020), has revealed some worrying trends. Based on the results of the 2020 assessment, in both 2000 and 2010, around 36-38% of assessments were incorrect. Of course, there are errors in two directions - some species are over-classified while others are under-classified - and there are a variety of reasons for these misclassifications. In this presentation we look at some of the reasons for these misclassifications, examine some of the patterns revealed by our analysis, and discuss some of the ways the classification process could be improved.