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Humans 1, Environment 0

27 09 2010

While travelling to our Supercharge Your Science workshop in Cairns and Townsville last week (which, by the way, went off really well and the punters gave us the thumbs up – stay tuned for more Supercharge activities at a university near you…), I stumbled across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the state of Australia.

That Commonwealth purveyor of numbers, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), put together a nice little summary of various measures of wealth, health, politics and environment and their trends over the last decade. The resulting Measures of Australia’s Progress is an interesting read indeed. I felt the simple newspaper article didn’t do the environmental components justice, so I summarise the salient points below and give you my tuppence as well. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, environment, extinction, Greenhouse gas, Overfishing, statistics
Categories : Australia, carbon, conservation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, fish, fisheries, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, IUCN, logging, mammal, pollination, Red List

Tropical biology and conservation overview

28 07 2010

Last week I attended the 2010 International Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) in Sanur, Bali (Indonesia). I only managed one post on the real-world relevance of conservation research (that attracted quite a lot of comment) while there, but I did promise to give a conference overview as I did for the International Congress for Conservation Biology earlier this month. So here goes.

This was my first ATBC meeting despite having co-written ‘the book’ on tropical conservation biology (well, one of very, very many). I no longer live in the tropics but am still managing to keep my hand in many different aspects of tropical research. After all, tropical regions represent ground zero for conservation biology – they have the highest biodiversity (no matter which way you measure it), some of the greatest threats (e.g., most people, most rapid development, most corruption) and some of the most pressing human problems (disease, hunger, socio-political instability). Ironically, most of the world’s conservation ecologists work in temperate realms – it should really be the other way around. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, ATBC, biodiversity, biology, conservation, Stuart Pimm, tropics
Categories : Amazon, biodiversity, biogeography, China, conference, conservation, conservation biology, habitat loss, harvest, Indonesia, logging, mammal, planning, prioritisation, REDD, tropical

Put the bite back into biodiversity conservation

2 07 2010

Today’s guest post is by Dr. Euan Ritchie, formerly of James Cook University, but who is now firmly entrenched at Deakin University in Victoria as a new Lecturer in ecology. Euan’s exciting research over the course of his memorable PhD (under the tutelage of renowned ecologist-guru, Professor Chris Johnson) has produced some whoppingly high-impact research. This latest instalment highlights a series of related papers he and his colleagues have just produced. We’re fortunate he agreed to give us his thoughts. Interestingly, the topic was just highlighted in the last issue of Nature: Don’t damage dingos.

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Corey has invited me to report on a recent paper published in Ecology Letters and another related study in PloS One, which together show how a better understanding of dingoes and their social structure and associated behaviour can help us to maintain or improve the health of our terrestrial ecosystems. This work, led by PhD student Arian Wallach (University of Adelaide), and involving collaborations with John Read (University of Adelaide), Adam O’Neill (C&A Environmental Services) and Christopher Johnson and me (James Cook University), offers some of the strongest evidence yet of the key roles top predators play in maintaining the balance.

Invasive species, along with habitat loss and the impacts of climate change, are among the greatest threats to the continued survival of many species. Because of this, millions of dollars and time is spent each year to control their populations. The impacts of invasive species in Australia are sadly all too obvious, with nearly half of the world’s mammal extinctions in the last 200 years occurring in Australia, with the prime suspects being the introduced domestic cat and red fox. However, despite massive, costly and ongoing attempts to control fox and cat populations successfully, we continue to witness the decline of many of our native species. Why? We would argue that the problem is that for too long much of our conservation and management efforts have been focused on treating symptoms and not the cause, which is the loss of ecosystem resilience (the natural ability of ecosystems to withstand change).

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, Chris Johson, conservation, dingo, Euan Ritchie, management, mesopredator
Categories : Australia, conservation, dingo, harvest, invasive species, kangaroo, livestock, mammal, management, recovery, The University of Adelaide

Biodiversity SNAFU in Australia’s Jewel

16 06 2010

I’ve covered this sad state of affairs and one of Australia’s more notable biodiversity embarrassments over the last year (see Shocking continued loss of Australian mammals and Can we solve Australia’s mammal extinction crisis?), and now the most empirical demonstration of this is now published.

The biodiversity guru of Australia’s tropical north, John Woinarksi, has just published the definitive demonstration of the magnitude of mammal declines in Kakadu National Park (Australia’s largest national park, World Heritage Area, emblem of ‘co-management’ and supposed biodiversity and cultural jewel in Australia’s conservation crown). According to Woinarski and colleagues, most of those qualifiers are rubbish.

The paper published in Wildlife Research is entitled Monitoring indicates rapid and severe decline of native small mammals in Kakadu National Park, northern Australia and it concludes:

The native mammal fauna of Kakadu National Park is in rapid and severe decline. The cause(s) of this decline are not entirely clear, and may vary among species. The most plausible causes are too frequent fire, predation by feral cats and invasion by cane toads (affecting particularly one native mammal species).

I’ve done quite a bit of work in Kakadu myself, and the one thing that hits you every time you travel through it is the lack of visible wildlife. Sure, you’ll see horses, pigs and buffalo, as well as cane toads and cats, but getting a glimpse of anything native, from Conilurus to Varanus, and you’d consider yourself extremely lucky.

We’ve written a lot about the feral animal problem in Kakadu and even developed software tools to assist in density-reduction programmes. It doesn’t appear that anyone is listening.

Another gob-smacking vista you’ll get when travelling through Kakadu any time from April to December is that it’s either been burnt, actively burning or targeted for burning. They burn the shit out of the place every year. No wonder the native mammals are having such a hard time.

Combine all this with the dysfunctional management arrangement, and you cease to have a National Park. Kakadu is now a lifeless shell that does precious little for conservation of biodiversity (and 3 of the 5 criteria it had to satisfy to become a World Heritage Area are specifically related to natural resource ‘values’). I say, delist Kakadu now and let’s stop fooling ourselves.

Ok, back from the rant. Woinarski and others superimposed a mammal monitoring programme over top a fire-regime experiment for vegetation. Although they couldn’t sample every plot every season, they staggered the sampling to cover the area as best they could over the 13 years of monitoring (1996-2009). What they observed was staggering. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, conservation, decline, Kakadu National Park, mammals
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, conservation, environmental policy, fire, invasive species, mammal, modelling, monitoring, protected area, reserve, tropical

Computer-assisted killing for conservation

12 01 2010

Many non-Australians might not know it, but Australia is overrun with feral vertebrates (not to mention weeds and invertebrates). We have millions of pigs, dogs, camels, goats, buffalo, deer, rabbits, cats, foxes and toads (to name a few). In a continent that separated from Gondwana about 80 million years ago, this allowed a fairly unique biota to evolve, such that when Aboriginals and later, Europeans, started introducing all these non-native species, it quickly became an ecological disaster. One of my first posts here on ConservationBytes.com was in fact about feral animals. Since then, I’ve written quite a bit on invasive species, especially with respect to mammal declines (see Few people, many threats – Australia’s biodiversity shame, Shocking continued loss of Australian mammals, Can we solve Australia’s mammal extinction crisis?).

So you can imagine that we do try to find the best ways to reduce the damage these species cause; unfortunately, we tend to waste a lot of money because density reduction culling programmes aren’t usually done with much forethought, organisation or associated research. A case in point – swamp buffalo were killed in vast numbers in northern Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, but now they’re back with a vengeance.

Enter S.T.A.R. – the clumsily named ‘Spatio-Temporal Animal Reduction’ [model] that we’ve just published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution (title: Spatially explicit spreadsheet modelling for optimising the efficiency of reducing invasive animal density by CR McMahon and colleagues).

This little Excel-based spreadsheet model is designed specifically to optimise the culling strategies for feral pigs, buffalo and horses in Kakadu National Park (northern Australia), but our aim was to make it easy enough to use and modify so that it could be applied to any invasive species anywhere (ok, admittedly it would work best for macro-vertebrates).

The application works on a grid of habitat types, each with their own carrying capacities for each species. We then assume some fairly basic density-feedback population models and allow animals to move among cells. We then hit them virtually with a proportional culling rate (which includes a hunting-efficiency feedback), and estimate the costs associated with each level of kill. The final outputs give density maps and graphs of the population trajectory.

We’ve added a lot of little features to maximise flexibility, including adjusting carrying capacities, movement rates, operating costs and overheads, and proportional harvest rates. The user can also get some basic sensitivity analyses done, or do district-specific culls. Finally, we’ve included three optimisation routines that estimate the best allocation of killing effort, for both maximising density reduction or working to a specific budget, and within a spatial or non-spatial context.

Our hope is that wildlife managers responsible for safeguarding the biodiversity of places like Kakadu National Park actually use this tool to maximise their efficiency. Kakadu has a particularly nasty set of invasive species, so it’s important those in charge get it right. So far, they haven’t been doing too well.

You can download the Excel program itself here (click here for the raw VBA code), and the User Manual is available here. Happy virtual killing!

CJA Bradshaw

P.S. If you’re concerned about animal welfare issues associated with all this, I invite you to read one of our recent papers on the subject: Convergence of culture, ecology and ethics: management of feral swamp buffalo in northern Australia.

C.R. McMahon, B.W. Brook,, N. Collier, & C.J.A. Bradshaw (2010). Spatially explicit spreadsheet modelling for optimising the efficiency of reducing invasive animal density Methods in Ecology and Evolution : 10.1111/j.2041-210X.2009.00002.x

Albrecht, G., McMahon, C., Bowman, D., & Bradshaw, C. (2009). Convergence of Culture, Ecology, and Ethics: Management of Feral Swamp Buffalo in Northern Australia Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 22 (4), 361-378 DOI: 10.1007/s10806-009-9158-5

Bradshaw, C., Field, I., Bowman, D., Haynes, C., & Brook, B. (2007). Current and future threats from non-indigenous animal species in northern Australia: a spotlight on World Heritage Area Kakadu National Park Wildlife Research, 34 (6) DOI: 10.1071/WR06056

Comments : 8 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, invasive species, science
Categories : Australia, buffalo, conservation, demography, dingo, environmental science, ethics, harvest, horse, invasive species, mammal, modelling, pig, planning, population dynamics, protected area

December Issue of Conservation Letters

11 12 2009

Gemsbok (Oryx gazella) in Namibia

Another great line-up in Conservation Letters‘ last issue for 2009. For full access, click here.

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Tags: biodiversity, conservation, conservation letters, science
Categories : bushmeat, conservation, environmental policy, extremism, fire, logging, mammal, marine, marine protected area

Shocking continued loss of Australian mammals

21 08 2009

thylacine As CB readers know, I’m in Brisbane this week for the 10^th International Congress of Ecology (INTECOL). My last post was on a great plenary talk by biodiversity guru, Kevin Gaston of the University of Sheffield, and I’ve got one more before heading back to Adelaide tomorrow.

Today, the last day of INTECOL talks, brought together some great conservation minds in a session in which I was honoured to participate. I spoke on extinction synergies, but I think John Woinarski of the Northern Territory Government stole the show.

I used to live in the NT and have seen John speak many times; however, this was one of the best and most sobering of his talks I’ve seen yet.

In a nutshell, we are STILL experiencing a colossal decline in our mammals. I think many might know that Australia is the WORST country in the world for mammal extinctions already – even more gut-wrenching when you consider that our closest competitors are small islands that have a completely different set of threats. However, many don’t know (and this is John’s point), that we are still losing populations at an outrageous rate.

John’s been working on everything from Conilurus to quolls in the central and northern parts of Australia for over 20 years, and he’s got some of the best data around. Without fail, almost every remaining native small mammal population is in decline, even to the point of local extirpation in over 50 % of all his monitoring sites (and there are a lot of monitoring sites).

If that isn’t worrying enough, much of his data are collected in some of our biggest national parks (e.g., Kakadu National Park) – this basically means that despite restricting habitat loss (our greatest driver of extinction), mammal populations are still in ever-increasing states of buggery.

So, what are the causes? Anyone who’s been to Kakadu National Park, or (even luckier) has been to Arnhem Land, know that we’re literally burning the shit out of these places. Sure, fire is an integral part of northern Australian ecology, but the pervasive paradigm – unless-it’s-burnt-every-year-it’s-bad credence – means that nothing ever has a chance to come back after a population crash caused by a one-off fire.

Sure, things like cane toads and other feral animals might play a role, but it’s the ridiculous burning regime we’ve adopted that’s destroying our already depleted and unique mammalian species assemblage. Unless we reverse this trend NOW, we’ll have more or less condemned our one-of-a-kind mammals to extinction. As an Australian, can you live with that?

A stark reminder of how ridiculous the situation has become, esteemed Professor William Bond of South Africa stated in the question period after John’s talk (I paraphrase):

“When you arrive in Australia, you are bombarded with slogans of sporting victories, great food and fantastic wine [all true], but no one tells you of the biodiversity tragedy that has, and is continuing, to happen in Australia. In Africa, we have managed to convince people to conserve elephants that destroy their crops and kill their families – why can’t Australians realise their are destroying their very heritage? What are you doing to stop the carnage?”

I have no answer. Sorry, William. Sorry, John. Sorry, Australia.

CJA Bradshaw