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How to improve (South Australia’s) biodiversity prospects

9 04 2019

Figure 2 (from the article). Overlaying the South Australia’s Protected Areas boundary data with the Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia layer indicates that 73.2% of the total protected area (excluding Indigenous Protected Areas) in South Australia lies in the arid biogeographic regions of Great Victoria Desert (21.1%), Channel Country (15.2%), Simpson Strzelecki Dunefields (14.0%), Nullarbor (9.8%), Stony Plains (6.6%), Gawler (6.0%), and Hampton (0.5%). The total biogeographic-region area covered by the remaining Conservation Reserves amounts to 26.2%. Background blue shading indicates relative average annual rainfall.

If you read CB.com regularly, you’ll know that late last year I blogged about the South Australia 2108 State of the Environment Report for which I was commissioned to write an ‘overview‘ of the State’s terrestrial biodiversity.

At the time I whinged that not many people seemed to take notice (something I should be used to by now in the age of extremism and not giving a tinker’s about the future health of the planet — but I digress), but it seems that quietly, quietly, at least people with some policy influence here are starting to listen.

Not satisfied with merely having my report sit on the virtual shelves at the SA Environment Protection Authority, I decided that I should probably flesh out the report and turn it into a full, peer-reviewed article.

Well, I’ve just done that, with the article now published online in Rethinking Ecology as a Perspective paper.

The paper is chock-a-block with all the same sorts of points I covered last year, but there’s a lot more, and it’s also a lot better referenced and logically sequenced.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, ecological restoration, Environment Protection Authority, environmental legislation, EPA, invasive species, restoration, Rethinking Ecology, SOER, South Australia, State of the Environment
Categories : agriculture, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, birds, carbon, climate change, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, deforestation, development, drought, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, endemic, endemism, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, Flinders University, fragmentation, function, governance, habitat loss, harvest, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, investment, livestock, management, meso-predator release, monitoring, Murray-Darling, planning, pollination, predation, prioritisation, protected area, recovery, reforestation, research, reserve, restoration, South Australia, southern Australia, sustainability, threatened species, vegetation

Minister, why is the dingo no longer ‘fauna’?

7 09 2018

dead dingo So, a few of us have just submitted a letter contesting the Western Australia Government’s recent decision to delist dingoes as ‘fauna’ (I know — what the hell else could they be?). The letter was organised brilliantly by Dr Kylie Cairns (University of New South Wales), and she and the rest of the signatories have agreed to reproduce the letter in full here on ConservationBytes.com. If you feel so compelled, please voice your distaste of this decision officially by contacting the Minister (details below).

CJA Bradshaw

Honourable Stephen Dawson MLC
Minister for Environment; Disability Services
Address: 12^th Floor, Dumas House
2 Havelock Street, WEST PERTH WA 6005
(minister.dawson@dpc.wa.gov.au)

cc: Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (biodiversity@dbca.wa.gov.au)
cc: Brendan Dooley (brendan.dooley@dpc.wa.gov.au)

Dear Minister,

The undersigned welcome the opportunity to comment on and recommend alteration of the proposed section (9)(2) order of the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 (BC Act) that changes the listing of the dingo from “fauna” to “non-fauna” in Western Australia. Removing the “fauna” status from dingoes has serious consequences for the management and conservation of this species and other native biota it benefits. Currently, dingoes are classed as A7, or fauna that requires a management policy. The proposed section (9)(2) order will move dingoes (as “non-fauna”) to the A5 class, meaning that dingoes must be (lethally) controlled and there will be no obligation for the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions to have an appropriate management policy (or approval).

Currently, under the Wildlife Conservation Act 1950 (WC Act) the dingo is considered “unprotected” fauna allowing management under a Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions management policy. A section (9)(2) order demoting dingoes to “non-fauna” will remove the need for Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions management policy and instead mandate the lethal control of dingoes throughout Western Australia.

As prominent researchers in top predator ecology, biology, cultural value and genetics, we emphasise the importance of dingoes within Australian, and particularly Western Australia’s ecosystems. Dingoes are indisputably native based on the legislative definition of “any animal present in Australia prior to 1400 AD” from the BC Act. Dingoes have been present in Australia for at least 5000 years. On the Australian mainland they are now the sole non-human land-based top predator. Their importance to the ecological health and resilience of Australian ecosystems cannot be overstated. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Australia, Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016, Canis dingo, Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions, dingo, environmental policy, human-wildlife conflict, mesopredator release, Minister for Environment, predator, Stephen Dawson, Western Australia, Wildlife Conservation Act 1950
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, cat, conservation, conservation biology, dingo, ecology, ecosystem function, endemic, environmental policy, exploitation, genetics, human-wildlife conflict, introgression, kangaroo, livestock, mammal, management, meso-predator release, predation, predator, research, science, top-down ecology

Four decades of fragmentation

27 09 2017

fragmented

I’ve recently read perhaps the most comprehensive treatise of forest fragmentation research ever compiled, and I personally view this rather readable and succinct review by Bill Laurance and colleagues as something every ecology and conservation student should read.

The ‘Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project‘ (BDFFP) is unquestionably one of the most important landscape-scale experiments ever conceived and implemented, now having run 38 years since its inception in 1979. Indeed, it was way ahead of its time.

Experimental studies in ecology are comparatively rare, namely because it is difficult, expensive, and challenging in the extreme to manipulate entire ecosystems to test specific hypotheses relating to the response of biodiversity to environmental change. Thus, we ecologists tend to rely more on mensurative designs that use existing variation in the landscape (or over time) to infer mechanisms of community change. Of course, such experiments have to be large to be meaningful, which is one reason why the 1000 km² BDFFP has been so successful as the gold standard for determining the effects of forest fragmentation on biodiversity.

And successful it has been. A quick search for ‘BDFFP’ in the Web of Knowledge database identifies > 40 peer-reviewed articles and a slew of books and book chapters arising from the project, some of which are highly cited classics in conservation ecology (e.g., doi:10.1046/j.1523-1739.2002.01025.x cited > 900 times; doi:10.1073/pnas.2336195100 cited > 200 times; doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2010.09.021 cited > 400 times; and doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01294.x cited nearly 600 times). In fact, if we are to claim any ecological ‘laws’ at all, our understanding of fragmentation on biodiversity could be labelled as one of the few, thanks principally to the BDFFP. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Amazon, BDFFP, Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, Brazil, edge effects, extinction, extirpation, fragmentation, rarity, South America, synergies
Categories : Allee effect, Amazon, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, deforestation, demography, development, drought, ecosystem, ecosystem function, endemic, endemism, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, fire, flood, fragmentation, habitat loss, invasive species, logging, management, metapopulation, monitoring, population dynamics, population viability analysis, protected area, recovery, research, reserve, South America, tropical

Help Hawaii’s hyper-threatened birds

6 01 2015

Puaiohi or small Kaua’i thrush. Photo by Lucas Behnke

You wouldn’t want to be a bird in Hawaii. There are more avian species threatened with extinction there than anywhere else in the USA. After humans arrived, some 70+ species have become extinct, and 31 are listed as threatened with extinction. In addition, 43% of 157 species are not native; among land birds, 69% are introduced species.

My friend, Cali Crampton asked me to promote their new crowdfunding project to reduce the threat of feral rats on Hawaiian birds. Please help if you can.

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The Kaua‘i Forest Bird Recovery Project, a collaborative project of the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, Division of Forestry and Wildlife, the University of Hawaii Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit, and Garden Island Research and Development, has announced the launch of a crowdfunding and outreach campaign to generate support for protecting the native birds of Kaua’i by controlling rats with humane, self-resetting rat traps.

The campaign, named “Birds, not Rats!” runs through to 31 January 2015, with goals of increasing awareness of the threats that rats pose to birds and native ecosystems, and raising at least $10,000 for rat control through many small, individual donations.

Hawai’i is at the epicentre of the current global extinction crisis. Of the original 130+ native Hawaiian bird species, many have been lost forever, and only 11 are not yet endangered. Today, Kaua’i is home to eight native forest bird species, three of which are federally listed as endangered: the puaiohi or small Kaua’i thrush, the akeke’e or Kaua’i akepa, and the akikiki or Kaua’i creeper. Populations of these birds have plummeted as much as 90% in the last five years; the akikiki and the puaiohi now number fewer than 500 individuals, and the akeke’e numbers fewer than 1000 individuals. The Kaua’i Forest Bird Recovery Project’s goal is to reverse these declines. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: birds, crowdfunding, Hawai'i, invasive species, invasives, Kaua'i, Kaua'i Forest Bird Recovery Project, rats
Categories : alien species, birds, conservation, conservation biology, decline, endemic, endemism, extinction, invasive species, predator

More species = more resilience

8 01 2014

While still ostensibly ‘on leave’ (side note: Does any scientist really ever take a proper holiday? Perhaps a subject for a future blog post), I cannot resist the temptation to blog about our lab’s latest paper that just came online today. In particular, I am particularly proud of Dr Camille Mellin, lead author of the study and all-round kick-arse quantitative ecologist, who has outdone herself on this one.

Today’s subject is one I’ve touched on before, but to my knowledge, the relationship between ‘diversity’ (simply put, ‘more species’) and ecosystem resilience (i.e., resisting extinction) has never been demonstrated so elegantly. Not only is the study elegant (admission: I am a co-author and therefore my opinion is likely to be biased toward the positive), it demonstrates the biodiversity-stability hypothesis in a natural setting (not experimental) over a range of thousands of kilometres. Finally, there’s an interesting little twist at the end demonstrating yet again that ecology is more complex than rocket science.

Despite a legacy of debate, the so-called diversity-stability hypothesis is now a widely used rule of thumb, and its even implicit in most conservation planning tools (i.e., set aside areas with more species because we assume more is better). Why should ‘more’ be ‘better’? Well, when a lot of species are interacting and competing in an ecosystem, the ‘average’ interactions that any one species experiences are likely to be weaker than in a simpler, less diverse system. When there are a lot of different niches occupied by different species, we also expect different responses to environmental fluctuations among the community, meaning that some species inherently do better than others depending on the specific disturbance. Species-rich systems also tend to have more of what we call ‘functional redundancy‘, meaning that if one species providing an essential ecosystem function (e.g., like predation) goes extinct, there’s another, similar species ready to take its place. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: beta diversity, coral reef, diversity-stability, ecology, fluctuation, metacommunity, metapopulation, portfolio effect, reef fish, resilience
Categories : algae, alien species, Australia, biodiversity, climate change, coasts, connectivity, conservation, coral reefs, disease, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, endemic, endemism, extinction, fish, function, invasive species, marine, marine protected area, metapopulation, planning, predator, prioritisation, protected area, recovery, reserve, shark, tropical

Tropical forests cooking their biodiversity

5 05 2011

Another ‘hot’ essay by Bill Laurance recently published online by Yale Environment 360 (a publication of the Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies). Bill asked me to relay it on ConservationBytes.com, so here it is in full:

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Much attention has been paid to how global warming is affecting the world’s polar regions and glaciers. But a leading authority on tropical forests [that would be Bill] warns that rising temperatures could have an equally profound impact on rainforests and are already taking a toll on some tropical species.

On Jan. 12, 2002, in the Australian state of New South Wales, biologist Justin Welbergen was observing a colony of flying foxes for his Ph.D. research. The temperatures that day on Australia’s subtropical, eastern coast reached record highs, soaring to 42.9 ° C (109 ° F) at the weather station closest to Welbergen’s study site — nearly 8 ° C higher than the average summer maximum temperature.

The flying foxes, or giant fruit bats, normally just doze in the treetops through the day, but on this afternoon they were fanning themselves, panting frantically, jostling for shady spots, and licking their wrists in a desperate effort to cool down. Suddenly, when the thermometer hit 42 ° C, the bats began falling from the trees. Most quickly died. Welbergen and his colleagues counted 1,453 flying foxes that died from the heat in one colony alone. The scorching heat that day killed at least 2,200 additional flying foxes in eight other colonies along a 250-kilometre stretch of coastline. All the deaths occurred in colonies where temperatures soared above 41.7 ° C. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, climate change, environment, Global warming, Heat wave, tropical forests
Categories : Australia, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem function, endemic, endemism, extinction, fragmentation, habitat loss, modelling, rain forests, tropical

The rarity of commonness

18 08 2009

I’m attending the 10th International Congress of Ecology (INTECOL) in Brisbane this week and I have just managed to find (a) an internet connection and (b) a small window to write this post.

I have to say I haven’t been to a good plenary talk for some time – maybe it’s just bad luck, but often plenary talks can be less-than-inspiring.

Not so for INTECOL this year. I was very pleased to have the opportunity to listen to biodiversity guru Professor Kevin Gaston of the University of Sheffield give a fantastic talk on… common species (?!).

clones

If you have followed any of Kevin’s work, you’ll know he literally wrote the book on rarity – what species rarity is, how to measure it and what it means for preserving biodiversity as a whole.

Now he’s championing (in a very loose sense) the importance of common species because it is these taxa, he argues, that provide the backbone to the persistence of all biodiversity.

Yes, we conservation biologists have tended to focus on the rare and endemic species to make certain we have as much diversity in species (and genetic material) as possible when conserving habitats.

There are a lot more rare species than common ones, and the most common species (i.e., the ones you most often see) tend to have the broadest distributions. We know from much previous work that having a broad distribution reduces extinction risk, so why should we be concerned about common species?

Kevin made a very good point – if you turn the relationship on its head somewhat, you can state that the state of ‘commonness’ is itself ‘rare’. In fact, only about 25 % of the most common species account for about 90-95 % of ALL individuals. He used an interesting (and scary) example to show what this can mean from an extinction perspective. Although very back-of-the-envelope, there are about 2000 individual birds in a km² of tropical forest; we are losing between 50000 and 120000 km² of tropical forest per year, so this translates into the loss of about 100 to 240 million individual birds per year; this is the sum total of all birds in Great Britain (a bird-mad country). Yet where do we have the best information about birds? The UK.

Commonness is also geologically transient, meaning that just because you are a common species at some point in your evolutionary history doesn’t mean you have always been or always will be. In fact, most species never do become common.

But it is just these ‘rare’ common that drive the principal patterns we see globally in community structure. The true ‘rare’ species are, in fact, pretty crap predictors of biodiversity patterns. Kevin made a good point – when you look at a satellite image of a forest, it’s not all the little rare species you see, it’s the 2 or 3 most common tree species that make up the forest. Lose those, and you lose everything else.

Indeed, common species also form most trophic structure (the flow of energy through biological communities). Take away these, and ecosystem function degrades. They also tend to have the highest biomass and provide the structure that supports all those millions of rare species. Being common is quite an important job.

Kevin stated that the world is now in a state where many of the so-called common species are in fact, “artificially” common because of how much we’ve changed the planet. It is these benefactors of our world-destroying machinations that are now in decline themselves, and it is for this reason we should be worried.

When you start to see these bastions of ecosystems start to drop off (and the drop is usually precipitous because we don’t tend to notice their loss until they suddenly disappear), then you know we’re in trouble. And yet, even though once common, few, if any, once-common species have come back after a big decline.

So what does this mean for the way we do biodiversity research? Kevin proposes that we need a lot more good monitoring of these essential common species so that we can understand their structuring roles in the community and more importantly, be able to track their change before ecosystem collapse occurs. The monitoring is crucial – it wasn’t the demise of small companies that signalled the 2007 stock market crash responsible for the Global Financial Crisis in which we now find ourselves, the signal was derived from stock data obtained from just a few large (i.e., ‘common’) companies. All the small companies (‘rare’) ones then followed suit.

A very inspiring, worrying and somewhat controversial talk. Watch out for more things ‘Gaston’ on ConservationBytes.com in the near future.

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, INTECOL, Kevin Gaston, science
Categories : biodiversity, biogeography, conservation biology, decline, endemic, endemism, extinction, INTECOL

Save the biggest (and closest) ones

12 11 2008

A paper we recently wrote and published in Biological Conservation entitled Using biogeographical patterns of endemic land snails to improve conservation planning for limestone karsts lead by my colleague Reuben Clements of WWF has recently been highlighted at Mongabay.com. Our main result was that following the basic tenets of the theory of island biogeography, the largest, least-isolated limestone karsts in South East Asia (biologically rich limestone outcrops formed millions of years ago by the deposition of calcareous marine organisms) have the greatest proportion of endemic land snails (a surrogate taxon for uniqueness among other species). I’ll let Rhett at Mongabay.com do the rest (see original post):

Researchers have devised a scientific methodology for prioritizing conservation of limestone karsts, biologically-rich outcroppings found in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. The findings are significant because karsts – formed millions of years ago by sea life – are increasingly threatened by mining and other development.

Using data from 43 karsts across Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah, authors led by Reuben Clements of WWF-Malaysia reported that larger karsts support greater numbers of endemic snails – a proxy for biological uniqueness among other species – making them a priority for protection.

“Larger areas tend to have greater habitat diversity, which enables them so support a higher number of unique species.” said Clements, species conservation manager for WWF-Malaysia.

With a variety of habitats including sinkholes, caves, cliffs, and underground rivers, and separated from other outcroppings by lowland areas, karsts support high levels of endemism among insects, snails, fish, plants, bats and other small mammals. Animals that inhabit karsts provide humans with important services including pest control, pollination, and a sustainable source of income (swiftlet nests used for bird nest soup, a Chinese delicacy, are found in karst caves). But karsts are increasingly under threat, especially from mining for cement and marble. An earlier study by Clements showed that limestone quarrying is increasing in Southeast Asia by 5.7 percent a year – the highest rate in the world – to fuel the region’s construction boom. The biodiversity of karsts – especially among animals that move to surrounding areas to feed – is also at risk from destruction of adjacent ecosystems, often by loggers or for agriculture.

Clements says the new study, which is published in the November issue of the journal Biological Conservation, will help set conservation priorities for karsts.

“The protection of karsts has been mainly ad hoc and they are usually spared from quarrying by virtue of being situated within state and national parks, or if they possess some form of aesthetic or cultural value,” he said. “Taking Peninsular Malaysia for example, our results suggest that we should set aside larger karsts on both sides of the Titiwangsa mountain range for protection if we want to maximize the conservation of endemic species. Protecting karsts on one side of the mountain chain is not enough.”

“With our findings, we hope that governments would reconsider issuing mining concessions for larger karsts as they tend to be more biologically important,” Clements said.

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Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : Borneo, conservation, endemic, endemism, habitat loss, island biogeography, karst, Malaysia, pollination, species-area curve, tropical

Cost, not biodiversity, dictates decision to conserve

26 08 2008

One for the Potential list:

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I’ve just read a great new paper by Bode et al. (2008) entitled Cost-effective global conservation spending is robust to taxonomic group.

After the hugely influential biodiversity ‘hotspot‘ concept hit the global stage, there was a series of subsequent research papers examining just how we should measure the ‘biodiversity’ component of areas needing to be conserved (and invested in). The problem was that depending on which taxa you looked at, and what measure of ‘biodiversity’ you used (e.g., species richness, endemism, latent threat, evolutionary potential, functional redundancy), the priority list of where, how much and when to invest in conservation differed quite a lot. In other words, the congruency among listed areas was rather low (summarised nicely in Thomas Brooks‘ paper in Science Global biodiversity conservation priorities and examined also by Orme et al. 2005). This causes all sorts of problems for conservation investment planners – what to invest in and where?

Bode and colleagues’ newest paper demonstrates at least for endemism, the taxon on which you base your assessment is much less important for maximising species conservation than factors such as land cost and the degree of threat (e.g., as measured by the IUCN Red List).

Of course, their findings could be considered too simplistic because they don’t (couldn’t) evaluate other potentially more important components of ‘biodiversity’ such as genetic history (evolutionary potential) or ecological functional redundancy (the idea that a species becomes more important to conserve if no other species provide the same ecosystem functions); however, I think this paper is something of a landmark in that it shows that ‘socio-economic’ uncertainty generally outweighs uncertainty due to biodiversity measures. The long and short of this is that planners should start investing if there is evidence of heightened threat and land is cheap.

A few other missing bits means that the paper is more heuristic than prescriptive (something the authors state right up front). There is no attempt to take biodiversity, threat or land cost changes arising from climate change into account (see relevant post here), so some of the priorities are questionable. Related to this is the idea of latent risk (see relevant paper by Cardillo et al. 2006) – what’s not necessarily threatened now but likely will be in the very near future. Also, only a small percentage of species are listed in the IUCN Red List (see relevant post here), so perhaps we’re missing some important trends. Finally, I had to note that almost all the priority areas outlined in the paper happened to be in the tropics, which stands to reason given the current and ongoing extinction crisis occurring in this realm. See a more detailed post on ‘tropical turmoil‘.

Despite the caveats, I think this could provide a way forward to the conservation planning stalemate.

CJA Bradshaw