Senior researcher Dr Angela Brandt says the team has only begun to scratch the surface of what the data can do to support environmental monitoring and decision-making. “Each year we publish the State of NZ Garden Birds | Te Āhua o ngā Manu o te Kāri i Aotearoa report. The analysis uses generalised linear mixed models to fit/estimate 10- and 5-year trends in counts or occurrence of 14 common garden bird species (five native and nine introduced species) from the national to the local scale,” she says.
A bar graph showing the national picture of how garden bird counts have changed over the past 10 years.
Angela says this approach can be useful for decision makers at multiple scales, using trends produced nationally, for regions and more locally. A more detailed case study on this was published in Ecological Solutions and Evidence in 2022 by a research team led by Dr Catriona MacLeod, where three years of NZGBS trends (2017–2019) were summarised and compared nationally, within Otago, and across neighbourhoods managed by Predator Free Dunedin. An interactive map displaying these results is available.
“To promote wider use of the NZGBS data for research and monitoring purposes, we have begun uploading the yearly data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). There are now 5 years of data that are publicly available (2018–2022) and we’ll soon add 2023.”
The NZGBS data have also been used as a biodiversity indicator in a multidisciplinary study of Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP) published by Dr Daniel Richards and colleagues in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening in 2023. Three years of NZGBS data (2018–2020) were used to model bird species richness across Ōtautahi Christchurch as one of nine indicators of NCP, to see how these indicators related to economic and social vulnerability across the city.”
