About ShorelineWatch
ShorelineWatch is how you record what you saw at the City of Moreton Bay's shorebird sites. It runs on your phone and works offline. There are two ways to take part: Watch the shore — the birds and what's happening to them — or Count the birds. Watch is open to anyone and takes a few minutes; Counting opens after a short interview with Gazza. Come on a roosting or feeding tide, do either lane, or both. Between them they feed the two records the Bay relies on: the long-running count for each site, and the per-visit evidence on what's happening to the birds at it.
There's one way in. You can take it at your own pace.
ShorelineWatch is open to anyone. You start as a Watcher and you're using the tool from your first visit. If you go on to do the Steward Course later, you keep ShorelineWatch, and you keep talking to Gazza. There's no rush about any of this.
Watcher
Open from your first visit — nothing to enrol in, nothing to pay. Start in Watch mode straight away, and your records go into the field record. To name and count birds, pass Gazza's short interview once — eight questions, six to pass — and Counter mode is yours.
Shorebird Steward
Two days at Jacobs Well, supervised practice in the field, and you're certified at the end. You keep ShorelineWatch; StewardWatch comes with it.
Register interest →Already met Gazza? Open ShorelineWatch → · Already a Steward? StewardWatch is your tool →
The roost census, and the site’s evidence
ShorelineWatch feeds two scientific records. The Count lane builds one, the Watch lane the other. Both matter, both are partial without the other, and both rest on the same act of watching the roost well. A visit can feed one, or both if you do both.
What’s there
The Count lane captures species counts, tide, and flock totals. These rows go to the For Shorebirds evidence sheet — the same kind of presence and abundance data that Moreton Bay’s shorebird monitoring tradition has been built on for decades.
This stream is about what’s there. Bird numbers across tides, seasons, and sites. The bedrock of how a roost is changing.
What’s happening to them
The Watch lane captures the per-visit evidence-layer fields: site-load score, visitor count band, whether signage and an officer were visible, whether dogs were on site, and the details of any disturbance event with the cause taxonomy (human, natural, spontaneous). These rows go to the same evidence sheet alongside the counts.
Ng et al. (2026), reviewing EAAF disturbance interventions in Journal of Applied Ecology, found 96% of published interventions are education programs and the field evidence on what actually changes bird outcomes is partial. These are the per-visit variables most often missing.
One visit, two records. The species counts feed the long-running site census; the per-visit evidence fields feed the disturbance and management record. Both flow from a single submit in the ShorelineWatch wizard.
What we capture, and why
When you submit a record through ShorelineWatch or StewardWatch, we capture your GPS location at the moment, the time, your pseudonym (or real name, your choice), and what you observed. With StewardWatch we also ask for your email. That's what BirdMark uses to send you the life history of any flagged bird you report.
Why we need the location: we want to know where shorebirds are actually using the bay, including roosts and feeding spots that aren't on any official list. Without accurate locations, we can't see that picture. On the public site we show patterns site by site, not individual records. We don't publish your records with your name on them unless you've chosen to use your real name.
What we can't promise. This is open citizen-science work. We didn't build it to hide you from someone who really wanted to find out who you were. We keep the records on a Google Sheet, on the phone you recorded with, and (for StewardWatch) in BirdMark's database too. If you have reasons your locations need to stay private, this might not be the right thing to join. That's fine.
If you'd like to use the tool but keep your everyday identity at arm's length, here's what helps:
- Choose a pseudonym rather than your real name when the tool asks. Both ShorelineWatch and StewardWatch support this.
- Use a relay email service when you sign up to BirdMark: iCloud Hide My Email if you're on Apple, or ProtonMail for anyone. Both give you a working email address that doesn't link back to your real one.
- Consider recording only from public sites. A 250-metre cell at Kakadu Beach is anonymous because hundreds of people stand there. A 250-metre cell at a private rural property may not be.
Most social media gives you less privacy than this does. People don't always realise how much they give away when they post a location-tagged photo. We're spelling out what we capture so you can decide for yourself.
Two minutes with Gazza, then ShorelineWatch is yours.
No course required. No subscription. Free, open, and your records start counting from the first visit.