WASHINGTON: According to Australian researcher, the survival of millions of Australia’s migratory shorebirds is being placed in jeopardy because of the rapid decline of key feeding grounds in north-east Asia.
A new “Great Wall of China” is being built that will eventually see an urban sprawl along 1800 kilometres of the Yellow Sea, placing additional pressure on tidal flats now visited by shorebirds on their annual migrations between Australasia and Arctic Russia.
Other pressures in a region that includes South and North Korea range from pollution and weed invasion to the damming of rivers and construction of off-shore wind farms.
So far some two-thirds of the tidal flat ecosystems have been destroyed, with a further two per cent disappearing annually, said Nicholas Murray, a conservation biologist now with the University of NSW.
“The destruction is in the order of what you see in tropical forests,” Dr Murray said. “Even in protected areas, there are illegal developments that impact the tidal flats.”
Among the bird species at risk are the threatened curley, bar-tailed godwit and the great knot. Some of the birds weigh only “as much as couple of box of matches” and can double their weight in a couple of weeks at the vital feeding stops before continuing their journey, Dr Murray said.
In a paper published this month in Austral Ecology, Dr Murray and fellow researchers Richard Fuller from the University of Queensland and Ma Zhijun from Shanghai’s Fudan University, used remote sensed habitat data to declare the status of the ecosystem to be endangered, according to International Union for Conservation of Nature criteria. The future is “grim”, the paper concludes.
