ALBERT

Description: A map of the tidal flats of China, Manchuria and Korea depicted in US Army Map Service Series L500, L542 and L552 topographic maps (compiled between 1950 and 1964). The topographic maps were georeferenced against prominent topographical features in L1T processed Landsat imagery and the foreshore flat class was manually delineated. For further information refer to Murray et. al. (2014).

Description: Shorebirds have declined severely across the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. Many species rely on intertidal habitats for foraging, yet the distribution and conservation status of these habitats across Australia remain poorly understood. Here, we utilised freely available satellite imagery to produce the first map of intertidal habitats across Australia. We estimated a minimum intertidal area of 9856 km**2, with Queensland and Western Australia supporting the largest areas. Thirty-nine percent of intertidal habitats were protected in Australia, with some primarily within marine protected areas (e.g. Queensland) and others within terrestrial protected areas (e.g. Victoria). In fact, three percent of all intertidal habitats were protected both by both marine and terrestrial protected areas. To achieve conservation targets, protected area boundaries must align more accurately with intertidal habitats. Shorebirds use intertidal areas to forage and supratidal areas to roost, so a coordinated management approach is required to account for movement of birds between terrestrial and marine habitats. Ultimately, shorebird declines are occurring despite high levels of habitat protection in Australia. There is a need for a concerted effort both nationally and internationally to map and understand how intertidal habitats are changing, and how habitat conservation can be implemented more effectively.

Description: While systematic biodiversity surveys are common in the Global North, much of the tropics remains vastly under-surveyed. With the rise in popularity of social media and camera phones, millions of people are now sharing their photographs online, which can be an effective source of biodiversity occurrence data. Here, we report on just such an exercise for the animals of Bangladesh, a megadiverse South Asian nation. This dataset was compiled by searching for species distribution records in seven large Facebook groups, following the method described by Chowdhury et al. (2021). The Facebook groups comprised: Birds Bangladesh (https://www.facebook.com/groups/2403154788); Deep Ecology And Snake Rescue Foundation (https://www.facebook.com/groups/959896627527624); Biodiversity of Bangladesh; (https://www.facebook.com/groups/249240636186853); Butterfly Bangladesh; (https://www.facebook.com/groups/488719627817749); Mammals of Bangladesh; (https://www.facebook.com/groups/647662968655338); Amphibians and Reptiles of Bangladesh; (https://www.facebook.com/groups/560709511527645); Biodiversity of Greater Kushtia (https://www.facebook.com/groups/244807066739477). In each group, we searched by species common name, obtained from IUCN Bangladesh (2015), double-checked the identification in each photograph, and georeferenced the observations using Google Maps (https://maps.google.com/). We excluded photographs if the identification was incomplete (coarser than species level), or incorrect; if the photograph did not allow clear taxonomic identification; or if the location was unspecified or could not be accurately determined.