This page is your map. Each entry is a doorway. The papers below document the bottleneck — the substance, and what it means for a Steward at Moreton Bay, lives in conversation with Gazza.
Doc 8 — Yellow Sea: The Staging Bottleneck
Field Practice Pathway · ~28 min read
The single most important fact in shorebird conservation right now is that birds leaving Moreton Bay must stage at the Yellow Sea — and the Yellow Sea is being lost. Doc 8 sets out the geometry: distances, fuelling demands, the staging bottleneck.
Murray 2014: 28% of Yellow Sea tidal flats lost over three decades. Up to 65% over fifty years. The decline of EAAF shorebirds maps onto this loss with frightening fidelity.
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Murray, Clemens, Phinn, Possingham & Fuller (2014)
Tracking the rapid loss of tidal wetlands in the Yellow Sea · Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12(5)
The first comprehensive remote-sensing measurement of Yellow Sea tidal flat loss. The headline figure has anchored every flyway-scale conservation argument since.
28% of Yellow Sea tidal flats lost between the 1980s and the 2010s. Some sub-regions — Saemangeum the most extreme — lost 95–97%.
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Piersma, Lok, Chen et al. (2016)
Simultaneous declines in summer survival of three shorebird species signal a flyway at risk · J Applied Ecology 53(2)
The paper that located the dying — when in the annual cycle EAAF shorebirds are losing their lives. The answer was not breeding, not wintering. It was northbound passage through the Yellow Sea.
Mortality is concentrated in the summer (passage and breeding) months, not on the Australian non-breeding grounds — pointing the finger directly at Yellow Sea staging conditions.
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Studds, Kendall, Murray et al. (2017)
Rapid population decline in migratory shorebirds relying on Yellow Sea tidal habitat · Nature Communications 8
The flyway-wide confirmation. Twenty years of AWSG counts across hundreds of Australian sites, mapped against species' degree of Yellow Sea reliance. The result was unambiguous: dependence on the Yellow Sea predicts decline.
The more a species depends on Yellow Sea staging, the steeper its decline. Eastern Curlew, Great Knot, Curlew Sandpiper — at the top of the dependency curve, at the bottom of the trend line.
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Murray, Ma & Fuller (2015)
Tidal flats of the Yellow Sea: a review of ecosystem status and anthropogenic threats · Austral Ecology 40(4)
The full catalogue of what is being done to the Yellow Sea — reclamation, pollution, declining sediment delivery, invasive Spartina, fisheries. Reads as a comprehensive case file rather than a single argument.
The threat list is not one cause but a portfolio. Stopping reclamation alone would not fix the Yellow Sea. Coordinated international action across multiple drivers is the framing.
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Moores, Rogers, Rogers & Hansbro (2016)
Reclamation of tidal flats and shorebird declines in Saemangeum · Bird Conservation International 26
The definitive account of what Saemangeum — the largest tidal flat reclamation project in human history — cost the EAAF shorebirds. The numbers are not abstract.
Shorebird declines of 95–97% at Saemangeum after reclamation. Great Knot collapsed from over 130,000 birds to a fraction. The birds did not relocate successfully.
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Choi et al. (2023)
International importance of tidal flats in the Republic of Korea · journal article · 2023
The paper that mapped how many Korean tidal flat sites meet international importance criteria — and how few are protected. The gap between ecology and law in numbers.
18 internationally important stopover sites in Korea — only 7 legally protected. Eleven sites carrying flyway-scale conservation weight sit outside the protection framework.
Source: Search Choi et al. (2023) Korean tidal flats international importance.
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Getbol — Korean Tidal Flats UNESCO World Heritage Inscription (2021)
UNESCO World Heritage · 2021 · serial inscription
The four Korean tidal flat sites — Seocheon, Gochang, Shinan, Boseong-Suncheon — inscribed jointly as Outstanding Universal Value for migratory shorebirds. The first international protection mechanism specifically for EAAF staging habitat.
The Getbol inscription is the strongest international legal instrument the EAAF has. What Australian shorebirds depend on, in part, sits inside a UNESCO World Heritage frame.
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Common Wadden Sea Secretariat — Quality Status Reports
Trilateral monitoring framework · Denmark · Germany · Netherlands
The Wadden Sea is the closest functional equivalent the EAAF has to look at — same kind of tidal-flat staging habitat, same kind of long-distance migrants, profoundly different management regime.
The Wadden Sea has continuous trilateral monitoring across three countries for over thirty years. The EAAF does not. The contrast is the policy argument.
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Wadden Sea Plan 2010 — Trilateral Management Framework
Binding management instrument · Denmark · Germany · Netherlands
The legal instrument behind the trilateral monitoring. What three countries managed to agree on for one shared coastal ecosystem. The EAAF has nothing equivalent.
Binding across three sovereign jurisdictions for a single coastal ecosystem. The closest existing model for what an EAAF management framework could look like.
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EU Birds Directive (2009/147/EC)
European legislative instrument · 1979 (codified 2009)
The legal frame Wadden Sea management operates within. EU member states are obliged to identify Special Protection Areas for birds and report on their condition. Member-state failure is justiciable.
The Birds Directive establishes binding species-protection obligations across all EU member states — comparable in scope to Australia's EPBC Act, but with stronger transnational enforcement.
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DOC — Shorebird Recovery Plans (NZ)
NZ Department of Conservation · Threatened Species framework
NZ's formal recovery planning under the NZ Threatened Species framework. Comparable in role to Australia's EPBC recovery planning, with different operational specifics — and a different cultural relationship to the land.
NZ recovery plans are publicly drafted, publicly reviewed, and explicitly partner with mana whenua on iwi-rohe sites — a model worth studying.
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Miranda Naturalists' Trust — Firth of Thames Technical Reports
Long-term count series · NZ · Firth of Thames
The companion to the Miranda journal: the technical count records behind it. The Firth of Thames count programme is the longest-running community shorebird-monitoring record in the Southern Hemisphere.
Decades of consecutive count data at a single EAAF site — the kind of dataset that lets a question like 'is this species declining here too?' be answered with confidence.
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Battley et al. — Bar-tailed Godwit tracking papers (NZ-side)
Tracking literature · NZ · the same baueri population
The NZ tracking work on the same baueri population that uses Moreton Bay. Multiple papers across the past two decades have refined what we know about the route, the timing, the energetic cost. Conklin (2026) sits at the leading edge of this lineage.
The B6 record — 13,391 km Alaska to Tasmania, 11 days, October 2022, juvenile first migration ~116 days old — comes from this tracking lineage, with NZ collaborators central.
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