More Birds in the Bush

These are the datasets associated with the More Birds in the Bush MBIE Endeavour research programme. This programme started in Oct 2018 and will run for 5 years. The datasets here were created in partnership with DoC and iwi.

Programme abstract:

Halting steep declines in NZ’s native forest birds requires urgent ‘scaling up’ of predator control across large areas of mainland forests. However, across the 84% of our warmer, more productive forests, we still lack the knowledge of highly complex food resource drivers to effectively control multiple predators and recover birds at large scales. ‘Warm’ non-beech forests once supported NZ’s most prolific birdlife, but are now our most silent. Our research will enable NZ to reverse mainland forest bird declines for the first time, through new ability to forecast both predator threats and bird outcomes across all different forest types. This will transform the effectiveness and efficiency of NZ’s large and growing forest restoration expenditure, by allowing the right interventions, at the right places and times, to maximise benefits for birds while avoiding perverse outcomes and fruitless efforts. We will identify drivers and scalable predictors of temporal variation in predator numbers and bird outcomes across forests using multi-decade field monitoring datasets, new measurement, and spatial data. We will develop new understanding of mechanistic processes in predator and bird populations, and mechanistic models that predict, for the first time, management outcomes for birds as well as predator numbers, across forest productivity gradients and through time. Estimates of how climate change and harvesting influence bird outcomes will become possible.