Biodiversity in Australia's National Reserve System - Part ... - BushBlitz

afforded to species for which we have few site records. Species that are likely to be under
represented in PAs can be considered for priority conservation action if land clearance and/or
degradation is/are likely to be an immediate and severe threatening process.
Methods
The methods used in this paper are based on those used to undertake a similar analysis of
frogs by Lemckert et al (2009).
The 2006 CAPAD database lists 8780 IUCN criteria PAs (see Figure 1) that protect
768,826,956 hectares (11.6%) of continental Australia, including Tasmania (see Table 3).
This level of reservation provided the baseline for comparisons of the expected reservation
levels for each group.
Records for each group were supplied by the Australian Government Department of the
Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts through the Australian Natural Heritage
Assessment Tool (ANHAT) database. This database has been compiled from specimen and
site records held in State, Territory and Commonwealth flora and fauna collections and
wildlife atlases, and from the work of individual researchers. ANHAT is a custom-designed
analysis tool built on Microsoft Access (Microsoft, 2003) and ArcGIS geographic
information system (ESRI, 2005).
Data was supplied on the following terrestrial groups: mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs, trapdoor
spiders, huntsman spiders, butterflies, land snails, carabidae land beetles, dytiscidae
water beetles and the dragonflies and damselflies. This included data on species that have yet
to be formally described.
Records dated pre-1950 were excluded from the data sets, as earlier historical site records
rarely have sufficient spatial accuracy for this type of analysis. Furthermore, site records
with a spatial error range >20 km were excluded and duplicate records removed. Records
within 500 m of each other were considered the same site and listed as a single spatial record.
Due to time limitations, review of taxonomic and nomenclatural changes of the species in
ANHAT was not performed. Time limitations also meant that names of undescribed species
were not able to be put into the correct taxonomic format, so that in many cases informal
names may appear italicised and/or not indicative of taxonomic rank.
Within each of the nine groups, any species with fewer than 30 records for vertebrates and
fewer than 10 records for the invertebrates was noted and removed from further
consideration. Such species may have been rarely recorded because they are rare, because
they occur in remote locations, because they are very cryptic or through a combination of
these factors. Regardless, we removed them because we believe it is difficult to assess the
relative state of reservation of such species with reasonable accuracy. For example, if a
species has two site records and both fall in a reserve, it is not reasonable to assume that it is
highly protected when most of its predicted range falls outside of reserves. We also removed
species that are now considered extinct, have suffered recent serious declines or have been
named relatively recently. Records for recently declined species may not provide an accurate
assessment because many are from sites where the species is not longer extant. The recovery
of these species is unpredictable and so assessing their relative reservation levels into the
future is difficult.
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