Poor quality monitoring data underestimate the impact of Australia’s megafires on a critically endangered songbird

Aim: Catastrophic events such as south-eastern Australia’s 2019/20 megafires are predicted to increase in frequency and severity under climate change. Rapid, well-informed conservation prioritisation will become increasingly crucial for minimising biodiversity losses resulting from megafires. However, such assessments are susceptible to bias, because the quality of monitoring data underpinning knowledge of species’ distributions is highly variable and they fail to account for differences in life-history traits such as aggregative breeding. We aimed to assess how impact estimates of the 2019/20 megafires on the critically endangered regent honeyeater Anthochaera phrygia varied according to the quality of available input data and assessment methodology.

Innovation: Using Google Earth Engine Burnt Area Mapping, we estimated the impact of the megafires on the regent honeyeater using six monitoring datasets that differ in quality and temporal span. These datasets are representative of the...