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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 »

Comments : 4 Comments »
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

Greater death rates for invasive rabbits from interacting diseases

30 05 2018

When it comes to death rates for invasive European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) in Australia, it appears that 1 + 1 = 2.1.

Tagged European rabbit kitten infected with myxoma virus, but that died from rabbit haemorrhagic virus disease (RHDV). Photo by David Peacock, Biosecurity South Australia.

“Canberra, we have a problem” — Sure, it’s an old problem and much less of one than it used to be back in the 1950s, but invasive rabbits are nonetheless an ecological, conservation, and financial catastrophe across Australia.

relative rabbit abundance South Australia

Semi-schematic diagram, redrawn using data from Saunders and others and extended to include the recent spread of RHDV2, showing changes in rabbit abundance in relation to the introduction of biological control agents into north-eastern South Australia. Dotted lines indicate uncertainty due to lack of continuous annual data. The broken line indicates a level of about 0.5 rabbits ha-1, below which rabbits must be held to ensure recovery of native pastures and shrubs (from B. Cooke 2018 Vet Rec doi:10.1136/vr.k2105)

Rabbits used to reach plague numbers in much of agricultural and outback Australia, but the introduction and clever manipulation of two rather effective rabbit-specific viruses and insect vectors — first, myxoma virus in 1950, European rabbit fleas in the 1960s to help spread the virus, then Spanish rabbit fleas in the 1990s to increase spread into arid areas, and then rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) in 1995 — have been effective in dropping rabbit abundances by an estimated 75-80% in South Australia alone since the 1950s.

Rabbits around a waterhole at the myxomatosis trial enclosure on Wardang Island in 1938. See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: biocontrol, calici virus, capture-mark-recapture, CMR, invasive species, MARK, multi-state models, myxoma virus, myxomatosis, Oryctolagus cuniculus, program MARK, rabbit haemorrhagic disease, rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus, rabbits
Categories : agriculture, alien species, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, conservation, conservation biology, demography, disease, ecology, environmental science, fox, invasive species, mammal, management, modelling, monitoring, predation, predator, research, South Australia

Job: Research Fellow in Palaeo-Ecological Modelling

13 04 2017

I have another postdoctoral fellowship to advertise! All the details you need for applying are below.

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KEY PURPOSE

Scientific data such as fossil and archaeological records used as proxy to reconstruct past environments and biological communities (including humans) are sparse, often ambiguous or contradictory when establishing any consensus on timing or routes of initial human arrival and subsequent spread, the timing or extent of major changes in climate and other environmental perturbations, or the timing or regional pattern of biological extinctions.

The Research Fellow (Palaeo-Ecological Modelling) will assist in addressing these problems by developing state-of-the-art analytical and simulation tools to infer regional pattern of both the timing of human colonisation and megafauna extinction based on incomplete and sparse dataset, and investigating past environmental changes and human responses to identify their underlying causes and consequences on Australia’s landscapes, biodiversity and cultural history.

ORGANISATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

The position will be based in the School of Biological Sciences in the Faculty of Science & Engineering at Flinders University. Flinders University boasts a world-class Palaeontology Research Group (PRG) and the new Global Ecology Research Laboratory that have close association with the research-intensive South Australian Museum. These research groups contribute to building a dynamic research environment that explores the continuum of environmental and evolutionary research from the ancient to modern molecular ecology and phylogeography. The School of Biological Sciences is an integrated community researching and teaching biology, and has a long history of science innovation. The appointee will join an interdisciplinary school of approximately 45 academic staff. The teaching and research activities of the School are supported by a range of technical and administrative infrastructure services.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

The key responsibilities and selection criteria identified for this position should be read in conjunction with the Flinders University Academic Profiles for the relevant academic classification (scroll down to Academic Profiles).

The Research Fellow (Palaeo-Ecological Modelling) will work under the direction of the Project Chief Investigator, and will be required to: Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Adelaide, ecology, employment, Flinders University, job, modelling, palaeo-ecology, postdoc, Postdoctoral Fellow, science, South Australia
Categories : Australia, climate change, community ecology, conservation, demography, ecology, environmental science, extinction, Flinders University, mammal, minimum viable population, modelling, palaeo-ecology, population dynamics, research, species distribution model

To feed or to perish in an iceless world

1 02 2017

Emaciated female polar bear on drift ice in Hinlopen Strait (Svalbard, Norway), in July 2015 – courtesy of Kerstin Langenberger (www.arctic-dreams.com)

Evolution has designed polar bears to move, hunt and reproduce on a frozen and dynamic habitat that wanes and grows in thickness seasonally. But the modification of the annual cycle of Arctic ice due to global warming is triggering a trophic cascade, which already links polar bears to marine birds.

Popular and epicurean gastronomy claims that the best recipes should use seasonal veggies and fruits. Once upon a time, when there were no greenhouses, international trade routes, or as much frozen and canned food, our grandparents enjoyed what was available at the time. So in some years we had plenty of cherries, while during others we might have feasted on plums. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: Arctic, climate change, extinction, Global warming, polar bear
Categories : birds, climate change, decline, evolution, extinction, food, mammal, predation, predator, trophic cascades

Transition from the Anthropocene to the Minicene

24 09 2016

Going, going … © CJA Bradshaw

I’ve just returned from a life-changing trip to South Africa, not just because it was my first time to the continent, but also because it has redefined my perspective on the megafauna extinctions of the late Quaternary. I was there primarily to attend the University of Pretoria’s Mammal Research Institute 50^thAnniversary Celebration conference.

As I reported in my last post, the poaching rates in one of the larger, best-funded national parks in southern Africa (the Kruger) are inconceivably high, such that for at least the two species of rhino there (black and white), their future persistence probability is dwindling with each passing week. African elephants are probably not far behind.

As one who has studied the megafauna extinctions in the Holarctic, Australia and South America over the last 50,000 years, the trip to Kruger was like stepping back into the Pleistocene. I’ve always dreamed of walking up to a grazing herd of mammoths, woolly rhinos or Diprotodon, but of course, that’s impossible. What is entirely possible though is driving up to a herd of 6-tonne elephants and watching them behave naturally. In the Kruger anyway, you become almost blasé about seeing yet another group of these impressive beasts as you try to get that rare glimpse of a leopard, wild dogs or sable antelope (missed the two former, but saw the latter). Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: Africa, Anthropocene, elephant, extinction, Holocene, megafauna, persistence, Pleistocene, poaching, rhino, rhinoceros
Categories : Africa, anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, buffalo, bushmeat, conservation, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, exploitation, extinction, fragmentation, habitat loss, living dead, mammal, management, palaeo-ecology, poaching, poverty, protected area, research, South America, threatened species, trophic cascades

More things stay the same, more we retrogress

20 07 2016

Within six months of Abbott and the Coalition seizing power in the 2013 Australian election, decades—if not centuries—of environmental damage and retrograde policies unfolded. But this was no run-of-the-mill incompetence and neglect by government—this was an all-out attack on anything with the merest whiff of environmental protection. The travesty is well-documented, from infamously axing both the carbon-pricing scheme and climate commission, eradicating Labor’s 80% emissions-reduction target by 2050, diluting the Renewable Energy Target, refusing to commit to enforcing the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act (fortunately, this is now law), defunding the only independent legal entity available to limit environmentally destructive development (Environmental Defenders Office), to even attempting to remove the rights of environmental groups to challenge development proposals (thankfully, that failed).

The Coalition’s backward and ineffectual climate change-mitigation policies alone are evidence enough for long-term damage, but their war on the environment in general means that even the future election of a more environmentally responsible government will not undo the damage quickly, if at all. As a result of these and other nearsighted policies, Australia remains one of the highest per-capita greenhouse-gas emitters on the planet, has one of the highest per-capita water uses of any nation, leads the world in mammal extinctions, continues to deforest its already forest-poor landscape, and is a society utterly unprepared to deal with the future challenges of a degraded planet.
Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: Australia, climate change, energy, Environment Minister, environmental policy, Greg Hunt, Josh Frydenberg, mitigation, politics
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, climate shift, conservation, corruption, deforestation, ecology, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, fragmentation, governance, mammal, management, poverty, protected area, research, science, threatened species, water

Biowealth

24 02 2016

While I’ve blogged about this before in general terms (here and here), I thought it wise to reproduce the (open-access) chapter of the same name published in late 2013 in the unfortunately rather obscure book The Curious Country produced by the Office of the Chief Scientist of Australia. I think it deserves a little more limelight.

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As I stepped off the helicopter’s pontoon and into the swamp’s chest-deep, tepid and opaque water, I experienced for the first time what it must feel like to be some other life form’s dinner. As the helicopter flittered away, the last vestiges of that protective blanket of human technological innovation flew away with it.

Two other similarly susceptible, hairless, clawless and fangless Homo sapiens and I were now in the middle of one of the Northern Territory’s largest swamps at the height of the crocodile-nesting season. We were there to collect crocodile eggs for a local crocodile farm that, ironically, has assisted the amazing recovery of the species since its near-extinction in the 1960s. Removing the commercial incentive to hunt wild crocodiles by flooding the international market with scar-free, farmed skins gave the dwindling population a chance to recover.

Conservation scientists like me rejoice at these rare recoveries, while many of our fellow humans ponder why we want to encourage the proliferation of animals that can easily kill and eat us. The problem is, once people put a value on a species, it is usually consigned to one of two states. It either flourishes as do domestic crops, dogs, cats and livestock, or dwindles towards or to extinction. Consider bison, passenger pigeons, crocodiles and caviar sturgeon.

As a conservation scientist, it’s my job not only to document these declines, but to find ways to prevent them. Through careful measurement and experiments, we provide evidence to support smart policy decisions on land and in the sea. We advise on the best way to protect species in reserves, inform hunters and fishers on how to avoid over-harvesting, and demonstrate the ways in which humans benefit from maintaining healthy ecosystems. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: Anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, ecosystem services, extinction
Categories : alien species, anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, biosequestration, biowealth, carbon, cattle, caviar, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental economics, environmental policy, extinction, fish, fisheries, food, function, habitat loss, human overpopulation, invasive species, mammal, meso-predator release, predation, predator, research, trophic cascades, water

Ice Age? No. Abrupt warmings and hunting together polished off Holarctic megafauna

24 07 2015

Oh shit oh shit oh shit …

Did ice ages cause the Pleistocene megafauna to go extinct? Contrary to popular opinion, no, they didn’t. But climate change did have something to do with them, only it was global warming events instead.

Just out today in Science, our long-time-coming (9 years in total if you count the time from the original idea to today) paper ‘Abrupt warmings drove Late Pleistocene Holarctic megafaunal turnover‘ demonstrates for the first time that abrupt warming periods over the last 60,000 years were at least partially responsible for the collapse of the megafauna in Eurasia and North America.

You might recall that I’ve been a bit sceptical of claims that climate changes had much to do with megafauna extinctions during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene, mainly because of the overwhelming evidence that humans had a big part to play in their demise (surprise, surprise). What I’ve rejected though isn’t so much that climate had nothing to do with the extinctions; rather, I took issue with claims that climate change was the dominant driver. I’ve also had problems with blanket claims that it was ‘always this’ or ‘always that’, when the complexity of biogeography and community dynamics means that it was most assuredly more complicated than most people think.

I’m happy to say that our latest paper indeed demonstrates the complexity of megafauna extinctions, and that it took a heap of fairly complex datasets and analyses to demonstrate. Not only were the data varied – the combination of scientists involved was just as eclectic, with ancient DNA specialists, palaeo-climatologists and ecological modellers (including yours truly) assembled to make sense of the complicated story that the data ultimately revealed. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: bison, cave bear, cave lion, climate change, climatology, extinction, Global warming, GRIWM, Ice Age, mammoth, megafauna, muskox, Neandertal, Signor-Lipps effect
Categories : anthropocene, Arctic, Asia, biodiversity, biogeography, boreal, Canada, climate change, climate shift, connectivity, conservation, decline, DNA, ecology, ecosystem, Europe, extinction, genetics, harvest, mammal, mathematics, metapopulation, minimum viable population, modelling, Russia, synergies, USA

What’s in a name? The dingo’s sorry saga

30 01 2015

The more I delve into the science of predator management, the more I realise that the science itself takes a distant back seat to the politics. It would be naïve to think that the management of dingoes in Australia is any more politically charged than elsewhere, but once you start scratching beneath the surface, you quickly realise that there’s something rotten in Dubbo.

My latest contribution to this saga is a co-authored paper led by Dale Nimmo of Deakin University (along with Simon Watson of La Trobe and Dave Forsyth of Arthur Rylah) that came out just the other day. It was a response to a rather dismissive paper by Matt Hayward and Nicky Marlow claiming that all the accumulated evidence demonstrating that dingoes benefit native biodiversity was somehow incorrect.

Their two arguments were that: (1) dingoes don’t eradicate the main culprits of biodiversity decline in Australia (cats & foxes), so they cannot benefit native species; (2) proxy indices of relative dingo abundance are flawed and not related to actual abundance, so all the previous experiments and surveys are wrong.

Some strong accusations, for sure. Unfortunately, they hold no water at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 17 Comments »
Tags: Australia, CRC, dingo, dingo fence, dingoes, dog fence, pest management, poison, predator management, predators, wild dogs, xenophobia
Categories : alien species, Australia, cat, cattle, conservation, dingo, ecosystem function, environmental policy, environmental science, fox, invasive species, kangaroo, livestock, mammal, management, modelling, predator, propaganda, research, trophic cascades

When human society breaks down, wildlife suffers

22 01 2015

Global human society is a massive, consumptive beast that on average degrades its life-support system. As we’ve recently reported, this will only continue to get worse in the decades to centuries to come. Some have argued that as long as we can develop our societies enough, the impact of this massive demographic force can be lessened – a concept described by the environmental Kuznets curve. However, there is little evidence that negative societal impact on the environment is lessened as per capita wealth exceeds some threshold; unfortunately environmental damage tends to, on average, increase as a nation’s net wealth increases. That’s not to say that short-term improvements cannot be achieved through technological innovation – in fact, they will be essential to offset the inexorable growth of the global human population.

So poor nations as well as the wealthy ones are responsible for environmental damage. Poorer nations often have ineffective governance systems so they fail to enforce compliance in environmental regulations, but wealthier nations often exploit a high proportion of their natural resources, with the inevitable environmental damage this entails. In some cases however, biodiversity can temporarily escape some of the ravages of society because humans either perceive the area to be too dangerous, or otherwise have no incentive to go there. There are some good examples of the latter, such as the vicinity around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that melted down in 1986, or the Korean demilitarised zone.

In this vein, I just stumbled across an extremely interesting paper today published online early in Conservation Biology that describes trends in charismatic wildlife (i.e., big mammals) as the former Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and societal breakdown ensued. The authors had access to an amazing dataset that spanned the decade prior to the collapse, the decade immediately following, and a subsequent decade of societal renewal. What they found was fascinating. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: collapse, exploitation, human population, over-population, Population, recovery, Russia, society, socio-political collapse, Soviet union, trends, turmoil, wildlife
Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, conservation, decline, environmental policy, exploitation, governance, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, mammal, population dynamics, Russia, threatened species

Using ecological theory to make more money

1 12 2014

Let’s face it: Australia doesn’t have the best international reputation for good ecological management. We’ve been particularly loathsome in our protection of forests, we have an appalling record of mammal extinctions, we’re degenerate water wasters and carbon emitters, our country is overrun with feral animals and weeds, and we have a long-term love affair with archaic, deadly, cruel, counter-productive and xenophobic predator management. To top it all off, we have a government hell-bent on screwing our already screwed environment even more.

Still, we soldier on and try to fix the damages already done or convince people that archaic policies should be scrapped and redrawn. One such policy that I’ve written about extensively is the idiocy and cruelty of the dingo fence.

The ecological evidence that dingoes are good for Australian wildlife and that they pose less threat to livestock than purported by some evidence-less graziers is becoming too big to ignore any longer. Poisoning and fencing are not only counter-productive, they are cruel, ineffective and costly.

So just when ecologists thought that dingoes couldn’t get any cooler, out comes our latest paper demonstrating that letting dingoes do their thing results in a net profit for cattle graziers.

Come again? Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 6 Comments »
Tags: Australia, cattle, cattle station, community, dingo, Ecosystem, graziers, Kangaroo, Predation, predator, prey
Categories : agriculture, Australia, biodiversity, cattle, conservation, ecological literacy, ecology, economics, ecosystem function, environmental economics, environmental policy, environmental science, food, harvest, kangaroo, livestock, mammal, management, modelling, population dynamics, predator

It’s not all about cats

20 10 2014

If you follow any of the environment news in Australia, you will most certainly have seen a lot about feral cats in the last few weeks. I’ve come across dozens of articles in the last week alone talking about the horrendous toll feral cats have had on Australian wildlife since European arrival. In principle, this is a good thing because finally Australians are groggily waking to the fact that our house moggies and their descendants have royally buggered our biodiversity. As a result, we have the highest mammal extinction rate of any country.

But I argue that the newfound enthusiasm for killing anything feline is being peddled mainly as a distraction from bigger environmental issues and to camouflage the complete incompetence of the current government and their all-out war on the environment.

Call me cynical, but when I read headlines like “Australia aims to end extinction of native wildlife by 2020” and Environment Minister Hunt’s recent speech that he has “… set a goal of ending the loss of mammal species by 2020“, I get more than just a little sick to the stomach.

What a preposterous load of shite. Moreover, what a blatant wool-pulling-over-the-eyes public stunt. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 6 Comments »
Tags: Australia, cats, dingoes, feral animals, feral species, foxes, invasive species, mesopredator release, poison, wildlife management
Categories : alien species, anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, cat, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, ecosystem, ecosystem function, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, extinction debt, fox, fragmentation, habitat loss, harvest, invasive species, logging, mammal, management, propaganda, research

Putting the ‘science’ in citizen science

30 04 2014

How to tell if a koala has been in your garden. © Great Koala Count

When I was in Finland last year, I had the pleasure of meeting Tomas Roslin and hearing him describe his Finland-wide citizen-science project on dung beetles. What impressed me most was that it completely flipped my general opinion about citizen science and showed me that the process can be useful.

I’m not trying to sound arrogant or scientifically elitist here – I’m merely stating that it was my opinion that most citizen-science endeavours fail to provide truly novel, useful and rigorous data for scientific hypothesis testing. Well, I must admit that I still believe that ‘most’ citizen-science data meet that description (although there are exceptions – see here for an example), but Tomas’ success showed me just how good they can be.

So what’s the problem with citizen science? Nothing, in principle; in fact, it’s a great idea. Convince keen amateur naturalists over a wide area to observe (as objectively) as possible some ecological phenomenon or function, record the data, and submit it to a scientist to test some brilliant hypothesis. If it works, chances are the data are of much broader coverage and more intensively sampled than could ever be done (or afforded) by a single scientific team alone. So why don’t we do this all the time?

If you’re a scientist, I don’t need to tell you how difficult it is to design a good experimental sampling regime, how even more difficult it is to ensure objectivity and precision when sampling, and the fastidiousness with which the data must be recorded and organised digitally for final analysis. And that’s just for trained scientists! Imagine an army of well-intentioned, but largely inexperienced samplers, you can quickly visualise how the errors might accumulate exponentially in a dataset so that it eventually becomes too unreliable for any real scientific application.

So for these reasons, I’ve been largely reluctant to engage with large-scale citizen-science endeavours. However, I’m proud to say that I have now published my first paper based entirely on citizen science data! Call me a hypocrite (or a slow learner). Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 15 Comments »
Tags: abundance estimate, Citizen science, citizen scientist, koala, Phascolarctos cinereus, SDM, South Australia, species distribution model
Categories : Australia, biogeography, citizen science, conservation, ecology, fragmentation, mammal, mathematics, modelling, research, South Australia, southern Australia

South Australia’s tattered environmental remains

16 04 2014

South Australia State budget percentage expenditures for health, education and environment

Yesterday I gave the second keynote address at the South Australia Natural Resource Management (NRM) Science Conference at the University of Adelaide (see also a brief synopsis of Day 1 here). Unfortunately, I’m missing today’s talks because of an acute case of man cold, but at least I can stay at home and work while sipping cups of hot tea.

Many people came up afterwards and congratulated me for “being brave enough to tell the truth”, which both encouraged and distressed me – I am encouraged by the positive feedback, but distressed by the lack of action on the part of our natural resource management leaders.

The simple truth is that South Australia’s biodiversity and ecosystems are in shambles, yet few seem to appreciate this.

So for the benefit of those who couldn’t attend, I’ve uploaded the podcast of my slideshow for general viewing here. I’ve also highlighted some key points from the talk below: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 10 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, degradation, environment, loss, native vegetation clearing, South Australia, State of the Environment
Categories : alien species, Australia, biodiversity, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, coasts, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, fragmentation, function, habitat loss, invasive species, kelp, logging, mammal, management, marine, marine protected area, monitoring, planning, prioritisation, protected area, recovery, reforestation, reserve, restoration, South Australia, The University of Adelaide, threatened species, water

Essential role of carnivores on the wane

10 01 2014

This interesting review has just come out in Science, and because I was given a heads-up about it, I decided to do a F1000 recommendation. That’s more or less what follows, with some additional thoughts.

Ripple and colleagues can perhaps be excused for stating what might appear to many ‘in the biz’ to be blatantly obvious, but their in-depth review of the status of the world’s carnivores is a comprehensive overview of this essential guild’s worldwide plight. It not only represents an excellent teaching tool, the review elegantly summarises the current status of these essential ecosystem engineers.

The world’s 245 terrestrial carnivores might seem to be ecologically redundant to the informed given their natural rarity, low densities and cryptic behaviour, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Ecologists have only within the last decade or so revealed the essential ecosystem functions of these species (see former posts on CB.com here, here and here). The review focuses on the largest and most well-studied species, but the trends likely apply across most of the order. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: Carnivora, carnivore, decline, ecological function, Ecosystem Service, mesopredator release, Predation, threatened species
Categories : cat, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, ecology, ecosystem function, extinction, habitat loss, harvest, invasive species, livestock, mammal, synergies

Too small to avoid catastrophic biodiversity meltdown

27 09 2013

Chiew Larn Reservoir is surrounded by Khlong Saeng Wildlife Sanctuary and Khao Sok National Park, which together make up part of the largest block of rainforest habitat in southern Thailand (> 3500 km²). Photo: Antony Lynam

One of the perennial and probably most controversial topics in conservation ecology is when is something “too small’. By ‘something’ I mean many things, including population abundance and patch size. We’ve certainly written about the former on many occasions (see here, here, here and here for our work on minimum viable population size), with the associated controversy it elicited.

Now I (sadly) report on the tragedy of the second issue – when is a habitat fragment too small to be of much good to biodiversity?

Published today in the journal Science, Luke Gibson (of No substitute for primary forest fame) and a group of us report disturbing results about the ecological meltdown that has occurred on islands created when the Chiew Larn Reservoir of southern Thailand was flooded nearly 30 years ago by a hydroelectric dam.

As is the case in many parts of the world (e.g., Three Gorges Dam, China), hydroelectric dams can cause major ecological problems merely by flooding vast areas. In the case of Charn Liew, co-author Tony Lynam of Wildlife Conservation Society passed along to me a bit of poignant and emotive history about the local struggle to prevent the disaster.

“As the waters behind the dam were rising in 1987, Seub Nakasathien, the Superintendent of the Khlong Saeng Wildlife Sanctuary, his staff and conservationist friends, mounted an operation to capture and release animals that were caught in the flood waters.

It turned out to be distressing experience for all involved as you can see from the clips here, with the rescuers having only nets and longtail boats, and many animals dying. Ultimately most of the larger mammals disappeared quickly from the islands, leaving just the smaller fauna.

Later Seub moved to Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary and fought an unsuccessful battle with poachers and loggers, which ended in him taking his own life in despair in 1990. A sad story, and his friend, a famous folk singer called Aed Carabao, wrote a song about Seub, the music of which plays in the video. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 6 Comments »
Tags: alien species, biodiversity, environment, extinction, extinction lag, half life, invasive species, island biogeography, mammals, relaxation, SAR, species-area relationship, Thailand
Categories : alien species, Asia, biodiversity, biogeography, conservation, extinction, extinction debt, extinction vortex, flood, fragmentation, habitat loss, invasive species, island biogeography, living dead, mammal, minimum viable population, modelling, monitoring, South East Asia, species-area curve

MPs’ ignorance puts national parks in peril

30 08 2013

Led by Bill Laurance, our latest opinion editorial in the Higher Education supplement. Interestingly, it has already spawned a bilious and spittle-flecked response by Queensland’s Acting National Parks Minister, Tim Mander. Given the evidence, who’s side do you take? I’m happy that at least one of the worst culprit state governments is at least now paying some attention to the issue.

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LAST week the world was appalled when Ecuador decided to open up one of its iconic national parks for petroleum development, with Leonardo di Caprio being among the chorus of dissenting voices. Yet the world should be even more disappointed in Australia, a far wealthier nation whose parks could be facing even worse threats.

Why is Australia going down this reckless path? It’s all down to the state governments – especially in Victoria, Queensland and NSW.

For the conservative politicians currently holding sway in these States, it seems it’s time to generate some quick cash while cutting park budgets – and never mind the impact on Australia’s imperilled ecosystems and biodiversity.

In Victoria, for instance, land developers are now being allowed to build hotels and other ventures in national parks. In NSW, recreational shooting and possibly logging will be allowed in parks if new legislation is passed. In NSW’s marine parks, bans on shore-based recreational fishing are being lifted [see previous post here].

Other parks in NSW and Queensland are being opened up to livestock grazing. In Morrinya National Park in Queensland, a strip of forest 20 km long was recently cleared for fencing, with new stock-watering tanks being established throughout the park. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Australia, biodiversity, greed, national park, national parks, politicians, Protected Areas, Queensland, Steve Dickson, Tim Mander
Categories : agriculture, Australia, conservation, corruption, economics, ecosystem services, exploitation, fish, governance, habitat loss, harvest, impact, livestock, logging, mammal, management, marine protected area

Don’t blame it on the dingo

21 08 2013

Our postdoc, Tom Prowse, has just had one of the slickest set of reviews I’ve ever seen, followed by a quick acceptance of what I think is a pretty sexy paper. Earlier this year his paper in Journal of Animal Ecology showed that thylacine (the badly named ‘Tasmanian tiger‘) was most likely not the victim of some unobserved mystery disease, but instead succumbed to what many large predators have/will: human beings. His latest effort now online in Ecology shows that the thylacine and devil extinctions on the Australian mainland were similarly the result of humans and not the scapegoat dingo. But I’ll let him explain:

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‘Regime shifts’ can occur in ecosystems when sometimes even a single component is added or changed. Such additions, of say a new predator, or changes such as a rise in temperature, can fundamentally alter core ecosystem functions and processes, causing the ecosystem to switch to some alternative stable state.

Some of the most striking examples of ecological regime shifts are the mass extinctions of large mammals (‘megafauna’) during human prehistory. In Australia, human arrival and subsequent hunting pressure is implicated in the rapid extinction of about 50 mammal species by around 45 thousand years ago. The ensuing alternative stable state was comprised of a reduced diversity of predators, dominated by humans and two native marsupial predators ‑ the thylacine (also known as the marsupial ‘tiger’ or ‘wolf’) and the devil (which is now restricted to Tasmania and threatened by a debilitating, infectious cancer).

Both thylacines and devils lasted on mainland Australia for over 40 thousand years following the arrival of humans. However, a second regime shift resulted in the extinction of both these predators by about 3 thousand years ago, which was coincidentally just after dingoes were introduced to Australia. Dingoes are descended from early domestic dogs and were introduced to northern Australia from Asia by ancient traders approximately 4 thousand years ago. Today, they are Australia’s only top predator remaining, other than invasive European foxes and feral cats. Since the earliest days of European settlement, dingoes have been persecuted because they prey on livestock. During the 1880s, 5614 km of ‘dingo fence’ was constructed to protect south-east Australia’s grazing rangelands from dingo incursions. The fence is maintained to this day, and dingoes are poisoned and shot both inside and outside this barrier, despite mounting evidence that these predators play a key role in maintaining native ecosystems, largely by suppressing invasive predators.

Perhaps because the public perception of dingoes as ‘sheep-killers’ is so firmly entrenched, it has been commonly assumed that dingoes killed off the thylacines and devils on mainland Australia. People who support this view also point out that thylacines and devils persisted on the island of Tasmania, which was never colonised by dingoes (although thylacines went extinct there too in the early 1900s). To date, most discussion of the mainland thylacine and devil extinctions has focused on the possibility that dingoes disrupted the system by ‘exploitation competition’ (eating the same prey), ‘interference competition’ (wasting the native predators’ precious munching time), as well as ‘direct predation’ (dingoes actually eating devils and thylacines). Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Australia, dingo, ecology, regime shift, simulations, Tasmania, Tasmanian devil, Tasmanian tiger, Thylacine
Categories : Australia, climate change, conservation, decline, demography, dingo, exploitation, extinction, harvest, invasive species, mammal, mathematics, modelling, population dynamics, population viability analysis, predator, synergies, trophic cascades

Saving world’s most threatened cat requires climate adaptation

23 07 2013

© CSIC Andalusia Audiovisual Bank/H. Garrido

The Iberian lynx is the world’s most threatened cat, with recent counts estimating only 250 individuals surviving in the wild. Recent declines of Iberian lynx have been associated with sharp regional reductions in the abundance of its main prey, the European rabbit, caused mainly by myxomatosis virus and rabbit haemorrhagic disease. At present, only two Iberian lynx populations persist in the wild compared with nine in the 1990s.

Over €90 million has been spent since 1994 to mitigate the extinction risk of this charismatic animal, mainly through habitat management, reduction of human-caused mortality and, more recently, translocation. Although lynx abundance might have increased in the last ten years in response to intensive management, a new study published in Nature Climate Change warns that the ongoing conservation strategies could buy just a few decades before the species goes extinct.

The study led by Damien Fordham from The Environment Institute (The University of Adelaide) and Miguel Araújo from the Integrative Biogeography and Global Change Group (Spanish Research Council) shows that climate change could lead to a rapid and severe decrease in lynx abundance in coming decades, and probably result in its extinction in the wild within 50 years. Current management efforts could be futile if they do not take into account the combined effects of climate change, land use and prey abundance on population dynamics of the Iberian Lynx.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: climate change, European rabbit, Iberian Lynx, Nature Climate Change, Portugal, Spain, Trophic interactions
Categories : biodiversity, climate change, conservation, mammal, management, metapopulation, modelling, population dynamics, population viability analysis, threatened species

No need for disease

7 01 2013

It’s human nature to abhor admitting an error, and I’d wager that it’s even harder for the average person (psycho- and sociopaths perhaps excepted) to admit being a bastard responsible for the demise of someone, or something else. Examples abound. Think of much of society’s unwillingness to accept responsibility for global climate disruption (how could my trips to work and occasional holiday flight be killing people on the other side of the planet?). Or, how about fishers refusing to believe that they could be responsible for reductions in fish stocks? After all, killing fish couldn’t possibly …er, kill fish? Another one is that bastion of reverse racism maintaining that ancient or traditionally living peoples (‘noble savages’) could never have wiped out other species.

If you’re a rational person driven by evidence rather than hearsay, vested interest or faith, then the above examples probably sound ridiculous. But rest assured, millions of people adhere to these points of view because of the phenomenon mentioned in the first sentence above. With this background then, I introduce a paper that’s almost available online (i.e., we have the DOI, but the online version is yet to appear). Produced by our extremely clever post-doc, Tom Prowse, the paper is entitled: No need for disease: testing extinction hypotheses for the thylacine using multispecies metamodels, and will soon appear in Journal of Animal Ecology.

Of course, I am biased being a co-author, but I think this paper really demonstrates the amazing power of retrospective multi-species systems modelling to provide insight into phenomena that are impossible to test empirically – i.e., questions of prehistoric (and in some cases, even data-poor historic) ecological change. The megafauna die-off controversy is one we’ve covered before here on ConservationBytes.com, and this is a related issue with respect to a charismatic extinction in Australia’s recent history – the loss of the Tasmanian thylacine (‘tiger’, ‘wolf’ or whatever inappropriate eutherian epithet one unfortunately chooses to apply). Read the rest of this entry »