This presentation shows what the Asian Waterbird Census is, and how the new publication "Status of waterbirds in Asia – Results of the Asian Waterbird Census : 1987- 2007" came about.
4.16.24 21st Century Movements for Black Lives.pptx
Status of Waterbirds in Asia from 1987-2007
1. Status of waterbirds in Asia – Results of the Asian Waterbird Census: 1987- 2007 By Taej Mundkur at the 4 th Meeting of the East Asian – Australasian Flyway Partnership Incheon, Republic of Korea, Feb 2010
5. International Level Regional Level National Level Site level Ramsar, CMS, CBD, IBA, TWB, WPE, GAINS, NEWFLUBIRD Regional Strategy, APMWCS, species action plans and site networks National wetland and waterbird conservation action plans and policies Site designations, site management plans and species conservation programmes Existing data users of IWC monitoring information
15. Status of waterbirds in Asia – Results of the Asian Waterbird Census: 1987- 2007 Available from: Natural History Book Service Download from: www.wetlands.org
Notas do Editor
For this meeting, we focus on the Asian region. Due to the differing conditions, the Arctic Breeding Bird survey serves as a means to collect information of the birds in this region. I will come back to this in a moment. The Asian Waterbird Census, AWC covers the main region of Asia down to Australasia. The IWC, of which the AWC is a regional activity, extends westwards across Central Asia, West Asia, Europe, south into Africa. The Pacific Ocean with its many island groups are important habitat for a limited number of waterbird species, that are not found in very high densities. This region is not covered by any coordinated census programme. Another programme for monitoring of birds and their habitat, includes the Important Bird Area programme coordinated by BirdLife International. A number of national bird monitoring programmes are in operation, I will come back to a long running and effective programme in Hong Kong shortly. There are only a few species focused monitoring programmes, such as for the threatened Blackfaced Spoonbill, as we shall see shortly So, there are various data sources of waterbird information, collected for different purposes and time spans. Many site based research projects exist, although access to this information is more complex.
Now more on the International Waterbird Census It was launched in 1967 in parts of Europe and has grown since. It is the longest running coordinated waterbird monitoring programme in the world. It covers most of the globe with 6 regional programs; co-operation with North America Large volunteer base, e.g. Western Palaearctic and West Asia - 11,000 people in 47 countries. Thousands are involved in other parts of as well. It is globally coordinated by Wetlands International from its head office in the Netherlands, and through regional coordination units.
The AWC was initiated in 1987 in the Indian subcontinent and rapidly grew to involve participants from across Asia. It now covers about 25 countries in South Asia, East Asia, South East Asia, Australasia and eastern Russia. To date, o ver 6,700 sites from 25 countries have been counted at least once since 1987. Undertaken by 1,000s of dedicated participants, numbers being difficult to track. Coordination nationally/sub-nationally by NGOs, government agencies and individuals.
We see here the existing data users of the IWC. This includes the GAINS programme, which has been very supportive of this work and the IWC data has been fed into the GAINS database and website. In addition, at a regional level, through the NEWFLUBIRD programme ongoing in Europe our data is fed into the surveillance programme (I would not be able to provide you details of this, but would be happy to forward any queries to our office).
If we look at the data, we can see that number of sites contributing information has varied considerably over this long time scale. There was a drop in the late 1990s, perhaps a combination of a number of factors. South Asia, and India have traditionally contributed a large number of sites. There has been a lot of variation in the annual coverage of sites in many countries, and in recent years, there has been an effort to try and improve the a
The regional results of the census are turned into reports that are available through NHBS or for download on the WI website. The latest regional report covers the 2002-2004 period. The report provides national reports and species information. 22 countries 2,032 sites 459 sites > 20,000 birds or 1% of a population 79 Ramsar sites 280 IBAs 36 EAAF Waterbird Network sites
The data from the AWC provides a flyway basis for prioritising conservation action, here is an example of the Central Asian-Flyway. It is possible to generate this for the East Asian Flyway as well, or for any other flyway covered by the IWC. In the case of AI influenza, it provides a basis for identifying congregatory sites for species and for passive and active disease surveillance. Many of these sites also have high poultry populations, particularly domestic duck.
The value of the regional census is evident in terms of looking at species distribution and concentrations. One group in relation to disease are the ducks, exemplified here by the Northern Pintail.
One of the valuable types of analysis that can be undertaken with waterbird count data is the analysis of population trends. In an ideal situation, the same sites would be counted in exactly the same way every year, and an assumption could be made that changes in the numbers of counted birds are representative of overall changes in numbers in a given region. A program called TRIM (TRends and Indices for Monitoring Data) (Pannekoek & van Strien 1998, http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/natuur-milieu/methoden/trim/default.htm) has been produced in The Netherlands with the specific task of allowing analysis of wildlife time series data with incomplete coverage. This allows population trends to be estimated in real world situations where a proportion of the sites are not included in the survey programme in some years. TRIM can easily cope with up to 20% missing values, and can produce seemingly valid results when up to 50% of the data are missing from the time series. The program TRIM was used to calculate population trend estimates in the Asia-Pacific region for which data quality were considered sufficiently consistent. This information is part of a new report that is currently with the printers. Do check our website out shortly.