Oct | 2011 | ConservationBytes.com

Where the sick buffalo roam

28 10 2011

It’s been some time coming, but today I’m proud to announce a new paper of ours that has just come out in Journal of Applied Ecology. While not strictly a conservation paper, it does provide some novel tools for modelling populations of threatened species in ways not available before.

The Genesis

A few years ago, a few of us (Bob Lacy, Phil Miller and JP Pollak of Vortex fame, Barry Brook, and a few others) got together in a little room at the Brookfield Zoo in the suburban sprawl of Chicago to have a crack at some new modelling approaches the Vortex crew had recently designed. The original results were pleasing, so we had a follow-up meeting last year (thanks to a few generous Zoo benefactors) and added a few post-docs and students to the mix (Damien Fordham, Clive McMahon, Tom Prowse, Mike Watts, Michelle Verant). The great population modeller Resit Akçakaya also came along to assist and talk about linkages with RAMAS.

Out of that particular meeting a series of projects was spawned, and one of those has now been published online: Novel coupling of individual-based epidemiological and demographic models predicts realistic dynamics of tuberculosis in alien buffalo.

The Coupling

So what’s so novel about modelling disease in buffalo, and why would one care? Well, here’s the interesting part. The buffalo-tuberculosis example was a great way to examine just how well a new suite of models – and their command-centre module – predicted disease dynamics in a wild population. The individual-based population modelling software Vortex has been around for some time, and is now particularly powerful for predicting the extinction risk of small populations; the newest addition to the Vortex family, called Outbreak, is also an individual-based epidemiological model that allows a population of individuals exposed to a pathogen to progress over time (e.g., from susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered/dead). Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: disease, epidemiology, MetaModel Manager, modelling, Outbreak, software, Vortex
Categories : Australia, buffalo, conservation, ecology, harvest, invasive species, mammal, modelling, population dynamics, tropical

Follow the TREND

24 10 2011

A little clichéd, I know, but that’s what it says on the T-shirt.

It’s been an interesting week. Not only did I return to some much-needed field work (even if it was diving in the muck of Adelaide’s Outer Harbour with 40-cm visability), but it was also the week when the TREND project became ‘official’ with the launching of its website and its public début at the Earth Station festival in Belair National Park over the weekend.

I can see the thought bubbles already – what the hell is ‘TREND‘ (apart from the obvious)?

Admittedly a somewhat contrived acronym, TREND stands for TRends in ENvironmental monitoring and Decision making – a multi-million dollar project financed mainly by the state government of South Australia and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN – I know, another bloody acronym that is weirdly similar to TREND; oh how we Aussies love our acronyms and initialisms!). Here’s the official summary:

“TREND provides a system of data collection across native ecosystems, primary production regions and marine environments. By assessing the impacts of various potential climatic and environmental shifts, TREND will provide an early warning system for changes in South Australia’s diverse environments and a lasting legacy of long-term monitoring, informed policy and proactive response to environmental change. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, climate change, Gulf St Vincent, marine, South Australia, Spencer Gulf, transects, TREND
Categories : Australia, climate change, conservation, environmental science, marine, modelling, South Australia, The University of Adelaide

Not magic, but necessary

18 10 2011

In April this year, some American colleagues of ours wrote a rather detailed, 10-page article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution that attacked our concept of generalizing minimum viable population (MVP) size estimates among species. Steve Beissinger of the University of California at Berkeley, one of the paper’s co-authors, has been a particularly vocal adversary of some of the applications of population viability analysis and its child, MVP size, for many years. While there was some interesting points raised in their review, their arguments largely lacked any real punch, and they essentially ended up agreeing with us.

Let me explain. Today, our response to that critique was published online in the same journal: Minimum viable population size: not magic, but necessary. I want to take some time here to summarise the main points of contention and our rebuttal.

But first, let’s recap what we have been arguing all along in several papers over the last few years (i.e., Brook et al. 2006; Traill et al. 2007, 2010; Clements et al. 2011) – a minimum viable population size is the point at which a declining population becomes a small population (sensu Caughley 1994). In other words, it’s the point at which a population becomes susceptible to random (stochastic) events that wouldn’t otherwise matter for a small population.

Consider the great auk (Pinguinus impennis), a formerly widespread and abundant North Atlantic species that was reduced by intensive hunting throughout its range. How did it eventually go extinct? The last remaining population blew up in a volcanic explosion off the coast of Iceland (Halliday 1978). Had the population been large, the small dent in the population due to the loss of those individuals would have been irrelevant.

But what is ‘large’? The empirical evidence, as we’ve pointed out time and time again, is that large = thousands, not hundreds, of individuals.

So this is why we advocate that conservation targets should aim to keep at or recover to the thousands mark. Less than that, and you’re playing Russian roulette with a species’ existence. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 6 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, ecology, environment, minimum viable population, minimum viable population size, MVP, SAFE index, Small population size
Categories : Allee effect, biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, demography, ecological triage, environmental policy, extinction debt, extinction vortex, inbreeding depression, minimum viable population, mvp, population viability analysis, PVA

Twenty landmark papers in biodiversity conservation

13 10 2011

While I can’t claim that this is the first time one of my peer-reviewed papers has been inspired by ConservationBytes.com, I can claim that this is the first time a peer-reviewed paper is derived from the blog.

After a bit of a sordid history of review (isn’t it more and more like that these days?), I have the pleasure of announcing that our paper ‘Twenty landmark papers in biodiversity conservation‘ has now been published as an open-access chapter in the new book ‘Research in Biodiversity – Models and Applications‘ (InTech).

Perhaps not the most conventional of venues (at least, not for me), but it is at the very least ‘out there’ now and freely available.

The paper itself was taken, modified, elaborated and over-hauled from text written in this very blog – the ‘Classics‘ section of ConservationBytes.com. Now, if you’re an avid follower of CB, then the chapter won’t probably represent anything terribly new; however, I encourage you to read it anyway given that it is a vetted overview of possibly some of the most important papers written in conservation biology.

If you are new to the field, an active student or merely need a ‘refresher’ regarding the big leaps forward in this discipline, then this chapter is for you.

The paper’s outline is as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Allee effect, biodiversity, biodiversity hotspots, climate change, conservation, demography, ecological triage, ecosystem services, environment, Evil Quartet, extinction debt, extinction synergy, fishing down the web, Genetics, habitat fragmentation, invasional meltdown, island biogeography, IUCN Red List, mesopredator release, minimum viable population size, Navjot Sodhi, shifting baselines, Tragedy of the commons
Categories : biodiversity, climate change, conservation, deforestation, demography, ecosystem services, fish, fisheries

Little left to lose: deforestation history of Australia

6 10 2011

I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to blog about a paper I’ve just had accepted in the Journal of Plant Ecology that isn’t yet out online. The reason for the early post is that the paper itself won’t appear until 2012 in a special issue of the journal, and I think the information needs to get out there.

First, a little history – In May this year I blogged about a workshop that I attended at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China at the behest of Fangliang He. The workshop (International Symposium for Biodiversity and Theoretical Ecology) was attended by big-wig overseas ecologists and local talent, and was not only informative, but a lot of fun (apart from the slight headache on the way home from a little too much báijiǔ the night before). More importantly, we lǎo wài (老外) were paired with various students to assist with publications in progress, and I’m happy to say that for me, two of those have already produced fruit (one paper in review, another about to be submitted).

But the real reason for this post was the special issue of papers written by the invitees – I haven’t published in the journal before, and understand that it is a Chinese journal that has gone mainstream internationally now. I’m only happy to contribute to lifting its profile.

Given that I’m not a plant ecologist per se (although I’ve dabbled), I decided to write a review-like paper that I’ve been meaning to put together for some time now examining the state of Australia’s forests and the history of her deforestation and forest degradation. The reason I thought this was needed is that there is no single peer-reviewed resource one can turn to for a concise synopsis of the history of our country’s forest destruction. The stats are out there, but they’re buried in books, government reports and local-scale scientific papers. My hope is that my paper will be used as a general reference point for people wishing to get up to speed with Australia’s deforestation history.

The paper is entitled Little left to lose: deforestation and forest degradation in Australia since European colonisation, and it describes the general trends in forest loss and degradation Australia-wide, followed by state- and territory-level assessments. I’ve also included sections on plantations, biodiversity loss from deforestation and fragmentation, the feedback loop between climate change and deforestation, the history of forest protection legislation, and finally, a discussion of the necessary general policy directions needed for the country’s forests.

I’ve given a few titbits of the stats in a previous post, but let me just summarise some of the salient features here: Read the rest of this entry »