Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2023L01712:body:0:p11
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2023L01712
Segment Type: other
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Character Range: 27233–30063

threatened with extinction. To achieve our goal of removing Tjakura from the threatened species list we will need to be able to demonstrate that our management and monitoring are effective enough to show that:

    ■  There are more than 10,000 adult Tjakura across Australia
    ■  Overall population trend is stable or increasing over a 10-year period
    ■  Geographic range (Extent of Occurrence) is not declining, and
    ■  Number of known inhabited places remains stable

  These criteria, drawn from the IUCN Red List guidelines (IUCN 2022), have been incorporated into the performance criteria measures that we have chosen for our conservation objectives and overall goal.

  Where does Tjakura live?

  Historical distribution
  Historically Tjakura occurred across a large area of inland Australia from the Broome region in the north- west across the Great Sandy and Tanami Deserts to Tennant Creek in the north-east, to Wiluna in the south- west and east across the Gibson and Great Victoria Deserts to north-western SA (Figure 1).

  Tjakura was originally described and named in the scientific literature from a specimen collected in 1891 from the northern Great Victoria Desert, about 150 km south-east of Warburton. Other historical museum specimens were collected from Bililuna and Godfrey's Tank (northern Canning Stock Route) in 1931, Punti Rockhole (south of Amata in SA) in 1932, Lapi lapi (north of Lake Mackay) in 1957, in the vicinity of Rabbit Flat (1938), Mount Liebig (1933), between Wiluna, Leinster and Laverton and at Warburton in the 1960s and Angas Downs and Yuendumu in the 1970s (McAlpin 2001). Additional specimens recorded from Roebuck Bay in 1896 and Tennant Creek in 1906 are likely to have been brought in from adjacent desert areas of unknown distance.

  There were no further sightings of Tjakura at many of these sites around the edge of the former range post-1980 and by the time the first Recovery Plan for Tjakura was written in 2001 it was assumed that the range of Tjakura had contracted significantly from the edges. Interviews with senior Traditional Owners from Watarru, Uluru and Yuendumu revealed that Tjakura had gone locally extinct at many sites they were formerly known from, leaving only a small number of widely separated sites within its distribution. Extensive tracking surveys through the Great Sandy Desert by Martu Rangers found Tjakura at only 3/150 track-plots (McGilvray 2013), and only 7 of 165 track- plots in the Tanami Desert in the 1990s (Rick Southgate, unpublished data, in McAlpin 2001). At UKTNP they were recorded at 15/190 survey sites (McAlpin 1997). None were found in the biological surveys conducted across the APY Lands from 1991 to 2001 (Robinson et al. 2003) however Tjakura was rediscovered in South Australia in 1997 when two Aboriginal women