The composition of many eastern Australian woodland and forest bird assemblages is controlled by a single, hyper-aggresive native bird, the noisy miner Manorina melanocephala. The "Avifaunal disarry from a single despotic species" working group harnessed diverse existing datasets and used them to develop and test models of noisy miner occupancy and impacts. Two datasets are published based on the analysis and synthesis.
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We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
This work was funded by ACEAS, a facility of Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), an Australian Government National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) project.
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Based on a review of the literature and expert opinion collated during two workshops, the working group built two conceptual models. The first considered how anthropogenic and natural factors relate to site occupancy by the noisy miner, and the second considered how noisy miner occupancy affects other bird species, and how consequent effects may cascade through ecosystems. We collated a dataset comprising 2,488 sites across eastern Australia and used it to test the key relationships in the conceptual models. We also used presence data from 51,980 sites in 37 IBRA bioregions from the BirdLife Australia Atlas dataset to estimate overall and bioregion-specific trends in noisy miner reporting rates between 1998-2012.
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