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Influential conservation ecology papers of 2018

17 12 2018

For the last five years I’ve published a retrospective list of the ‘top’ 20 influential papers of the year as assessed by experts in F1000 Prime — so, I’m doing so again for 2018 (interesting side note: six of the twenty papers highlighted here for 2018 appear in Science magazine). See previous years’ posts here: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.

Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages — The authors report an unprecedented, regional-scale shift in the composition of coral assemblages, reflecting markedly divergent responses to heat stress by different taxa.
Mammal diversity will take millions of years to recover from the current biodiversity crisis — … highlights the impending catastrophe that human activity is bringing to the planet, not only due to climate breakdown … but also potential loss of mammalian diversity.
Protect the last of the wild — … highlights the potentially irreversible impact humans have had on the planet, to the extent that only ~ 20% remains as wilderness.
A final warning to planet Earth — Scientists have issued numerous warnings to politicians and to the general population, but to little avail: the consumerism show must go on!
The cognition of ‘nuisance’ species — … discuss[es] the underlying cognitive abilities that may explain [invasive species] thriving in human-modified environments and then discuss[es] how this knowledge could be used to control such species.

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Tags: biodiversity hotspots, biodiversity loss, climate breakdown, climate change, cognition, coral reefs, disease, fieldwork, Fish, fisheries, fishing impacts, Great Barrier Reef, killer whales, mammals, nuisance species, plastics, predators, productivity, richness-productivity relationship, sharks, Species richness, wild areas
Categories : anthropocene, aquaculture, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, climate shift, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, demography, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, fish, fisheries, food, fragmentation, function, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, invasive species, management, marine, marine protected area, modelling, pollination, pollution

Save a jaguar by eating less meat

8 10 2018

My encounter with Kaayana in Kaa-Iya National Park in the Bolivian Chaco. Her cub was around but cannot be seen in the photo

I was trapped. Or so I thought.

The jaguar came towards me on the dirt road, calmly but attentively in the dusky light, her nearly full grown cub behind her. Nervous and with only a torch as defence, I held the light high above my head as she approached, trying to look taller. But she was merely curious; and, after 20 minutes, they left. I walked home in the thickening darkness, amazed at having come so close to South America’s top predator. We later named this mother jaguar ‘Kaayana’, because she lives inside Kaa-Iya National Park in the Bolivian Chaco. My fascination with jaguars has only grown since then, but the chances of encountering this incredible animal in the wild have shrunk even since that night.

A few years after that encounter, I’m back to study jaguars in the same forest, only now at the scale of the whole South American Gran Chaco. Jaguars are the third largest cats in the world and the top predators across Latin America. This means that they are essential for keeping ecosystems healthy. However, they are disappearing rapidly in parts of their range.

Understanding how and where the jaguar’s main threats — habitat destruction and hunting — affect them is fundamental to set appropriate strategies to save them. These threats are not only damaging on their own, but they sometimes act simultaneously in an area, potentially having impacts that are larger than their simple sum. For instance, a new road doesn’t only promote deforestation, it also increases hunters’ ability to get into previously inaccessible forests. Similarly, when the forest is cut for cattle ranching, ranchers often kill jaguars for fears of stock loss.

Kaayana was seen years later by Daniel Alarcón, who took much better photos of her and her new cubs

However, the interactions between these threats are still not fully understood. In our new study, just published in the journal Diversity and Distributions, we developed a new framework to quantify how and where habitat destruction and hunting risk acted together over three decades, at the expense of highly suitable jaguar habitat in the Gran Chaco. We also analyzed how well the different Chaco countries — Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina — and their protected areas maintained key jaguar habitat. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Argentina, big cats, Bolivia, Chaco, Felidae, Gran Chaco, habitat loss, human-wildlife conflict, jaguar, Panthera onca, Paraguay, poaching, predators
Categories : agriculture, Amazon, biodiversity, biogeography, cat, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, development, environmental policy, exploitation, food, habitat loss, harvest, human-wildlife conflict, livestock, mammal, management, poaching, predation, predator, protected area, research, South America, top-down ecology

Influential conservation ecology papers of 2017

27 12 2017

As I have done for the last four years (2016, 2015, 2014, 2013), here’s another retrospective list of the top 20 influential conservation papers of 2017 as assessed by experts in F1000 Prime.

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Tags: Africa, Amazon, biodiversity, boundaries, cats, climate change, decline, depression, disturbance, dogs, drowning, elevation, eutrophication, Fish, forests, fragmentation, Genetics, Global warming, green spaces, insects, mental health, networks, nutrient cycling, ocean, oil, oil spill, oxygen, photosynthesis, phytoplankton, Planetary boundaries, Predation, predators, prey, productivity, rainfall, richness, Soil, wildebeest, zooplankton
Categories : Africa, algae, Amazon, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, cat, climate change, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation ecology, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, drought, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental science, eutrophication, extinction, extinction debt, fish, fragmentation, function, genetics, habitat loss, marine, pollination, toxicology

Influential conservation papers of 2015

25 12 2015

As I did last year and the year before, here’s another arbitrary, retrospective list of the top 20 influential conservation papers of 2015 as assessed via F1000 Prime.

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Tags: Anthropocene, assemblage, bees, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, disease, ecosystem services, ecosystems, extinction, fisheries, forests, grazing, health, IPBES, metapopulation, MPA, neonicotinoids, payments for ecosystem services, pollination, Predation, predators, Protected Areas, resilience, species loss
Categories : conservation

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 »