The first of its type in the world, the TSX provides reliable and robust measures of change in the relative abundance of Australia’s threatened and near-threatened species at national, state and regional levels.
Understanding these changes in species populations is crucial for monitoring progress towards global conservation targets. Moreover, the TSX allows users to measure and report on the benefits of conservation investments, as well as justify and design targeted responses and raise the profile of threatened species.
The TSX is managed by the NCRIS-funded Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) at The University of Queensland and supported by the Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW).
It was established by the National Environmental Science Program’s Threatened Species Recovery Hub, The University of Queensland and Birdlife Australia.
The TSX can assist policy makers, conservation managers and the public to understand how some of the population trends across Australia’s threatened species are changing over time.
It will inform policy and investment decisions, and enable coherent and transparent reporting on relative changes in threatened species numbers at national, state and regional levels. The method by which Australia’s TSX has been created is based on the Living Planet Index, a method developed by World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London.
How can the index be used?
For the first time in Australia, an index has been developed that can provide reliable and rigorous measures of trends across Australia’s threatened species. In addition to communicating overall trends, the indices can be interrogated, and the data downloaded via a web-app to allow trends for different taxonomic groups or regions to be explored and compared. So far, the index has been populated with data for threatened birds, mammals and plants, with additional groups to be added in future.
By bringing together monitoring data, these indices will allow Australian governments, non-government organisations, stakeholders and the community to better understand and report on trends for threatened species groups including which are decreasing, increasing or staying stable. It will enable us to better understand the performance of conservation strategies and return on investment in threatened species recovery, as well as informing priorities for future investment.
