A bird occupancy estimator for land practitioners in the NSW South Western Slopes bioregion

Abstract

Biodiversity loss is a major issue internationally and within Australia, with major restoration efforts to recover native biota focussing on agricultural landscapes. We introduce a free new webtool, BirdCast [https://sustfarm.shinyapps.io/BirdCast/], for estimating the primarily native bird biodiversity in Box Gum Grassy Woodlands within the NSW South Western Slopes bioregion. The tool has potential to demonstrate farm‐scale bird biodiversity dividends generated from past and future investments in vegetation management and restoration programmes. BirdCast incorporates 60 of the most commonly encountered bird species and includes visualisations, data export and summary reports for printing. It is underpinned by a large joint‐species distribution model fitted to 17 years of empirical data.