Systematic Survey And Volunteer Birding Of Waterbirds In China —History And Present, Analysis And Comparison

Waterbird monitoring is a vital task for China. Changes in waterbird population and distribution is an important index in environmental assessment. Waterbird monitoring supports manifold international organizations, conventions and decrees with scientific survey data. Thus it’s inextricable for China to fufill its international duty by improving waterbird monitoring. China has numerous rivers and lakes, alongside of abundant water resource, China is also ranked fourth in the world in wetland surface-10% of the world’s wetland. Thus, China is the most important wintering and stopover habitats for migratory waterbirds on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. However, waterbirds within this flyway is severely threatened. Current ecological databases in China mainly focus on basic ecological information and few record spatial-temporal data on species distribution and population, which are essential for ecology research.By far, systematic surveys and birdings are not systematically organized in larger spatial or temporal scales. Not only our current work is not sufficient to meet the internationally monitoring standards, but also we are unable to confront the severe situation in waterbird conservation. Therefore, we need to review our systematic surveys and volunteer birdings to find out limitations and problems. While, we should exploit more data from volunteer birdings to serve waterbird monitoring and conservation.We built the Chinese Waterbird Database by compiling data from published literatures and reports, unpublished systematic surveys and birding records. The records from the Database concerned all 34 provinces,258 species and more than 100 years.Results demonstrated that waterbirds related researches and birding were significantly affected by socio-economic development. The initiate research on waterbird in China was 100-year later than that in Western countries. After that, researches kept standstill for a long time. During the 1990s waterbird related researches and birding began to burgeon and prosper. In recent decades, bird watching has become increasingly popular in China. The development of bird watching activities was positively related with the local economic conditions while the number of records was much greater in developed areas than that in undeveloped areas.Sometimes volunteer-conducted bird watching records are the only available historical data, however their reliability is not accepted by most scientists. We aimed to test the availability of volunteer-conducted data from Birdtalker comparing to system surveys. Also, we compared the predictions from List Length Analysis based on volunteer-conducted data to those from Generalized Additive Model (GAM) analysis based on system survey data in Anhui and Jiangxi. In summary, volunteer-conducted survey times and number of records were much more than those of system surveys, while number of recorded species was almost the same. The results were not satisfying: only half predicted species populations were same. One possible reason might be the sampling duration of system surveys is not enough for prediction. Alternative one is the uncertainty during birding. However, predictions of swan goose in Anhui and lesser white-fronted goose in Jiangxi from LLA coincided with our previous hypotheses, which proved volunteer-based LLA could be valuable in future use.In our study, we established the first China Waterbirds Database firstly. Secondly, we reviewed the history of waterbird research and volunteer-conducted birdwatching according to our database. Thirdly, we tried to understand effects of socio-economic developments on waterbirds related researches and birding. And finally, we compared the populations trends estimated by volunteer-conducted birdwatching data to those modelled by system survey in Jiangxi and Anhui Province.Our results suggest that in order to understand the distribution and population trend from the national scales, we should strengthen cooperations between different affiliations by sharing survey data, and try to organize and guide birding activies to serve in waterbird monitoring and conservation. Volunteer-based bird watching could play a more important role in environmental monitoring in the future.