Influential conservation papers of 2021

5 01 2022

Following my annual tradition, I present the retrospective list of the ‘top’ 20 influential papers of 2021 as assessed by experts in Faculty Opinions (formerly known as F1000). These are in no particular order. See previous years’ lists here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.

Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change — “… confirms what the sparse forest inventory has suggested, that climate change and land-use change is driving Amazonian ecosystems toward carbon sinks. … the research team provides a robust estimate of the carbon dynamics of one of the world’s most important ecosystems and provides insights into the role of land use change and potentials for mitigating direct carbon losses in the future.“

Organic and conservation agriculture promote ecosystem multifunctionality — “… a very clear insight into the trade-offs between the different ecosystem services and indicate that yield and product quality are lower in organic systems compared to conventional systems, yet organic systems have higher economic performance due to higher product prices and subsidies.“

Biodiversity of coral reef cryptobiota shuffles but does not decline under the combined stressors of ocean warming and acidification — “… even with similar richness, community function is very likely to be perturbed by ocean warming/acidification with unpredictable impacts on economically important species such as fish and corals.“

Local conditions magnify coral loss after marine heatwaves — “… show that climate-induced coral loss is greater in areas with elevated seaweed abundance and elevated sea urchin densities, both of which commonly result from local overfishing … effective local management can synergize with global efforts to mitigate climate change and help coral reefs survive the Anthropocene.“

Large ecosystem-scale effects of restoration fail to mitigate impacts of land-use legacies in longleaf pine savannas — “… while restoration can have major benefits in longleaf savannas, land-use legacies have clear effects on many aspects of the ecosystem.“

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Categories : agriculture, alien species, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, conservation, coral reefs, deforestation, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, evolution, extinction, fish, fisheries, food, fragmentation, habitat loss, invasive species, protected area, reforestation, restoration

Killing (feral) cats quickly (and efficiently)

20 05 2021

I’m pleased to announce the publication of a paper led by Kathryn Venning (KV) that was derived from her Honours work in the lab. Although she’s well into her PhD on an entirely different topic, I’m overjoyed that she persevered and saw this work to publication.

Here, killa, killa, killa, killa …

As you probably already know, feral cats are a huge problem in Australia. The are probably the primary reason Australia leads the world in mammal extinctions in particular, and largely the reason so many re-introduction attempts of threatened marsupials fail miserably only after a few years.

Feral cats occupy every habitat in the country, from the high tropics to the deserts, and from the mountains to the sea. They adapt to the cold just as easily as they adapt to the extreme heat, and they can eat just about anything that moves, from invertebrates to the carcases of much larger animals that they scavenge.

Cats are Australia’s bane, but you can’t help but be at least a little impressed with their resilience.

Still, we have to try our best to get rid of them where we can, or at least reduce their densities to the point where their ecological damage is limited.

Typically, the only efficient and cost-effective way to do that is via lethal control, but by using various means. These can include direct shooting, trapping, aerial poison-baiting, and a new ‘smart’ method of targeted poison delivery via a prototype device known as a Felixer™️. The latter are particularly useful for passive control in areas where ground-shooting access is difficult.

A live Felixer™️ deployed on Kangaroo Island (photo: CJA Bradshaw 2020)

A few years back the federal government committed what might seem like a sizeable amount of money to ‘eradicate’ cats from Australia. Yeah, good luck with that, although the money has been allocated to several places where cat reduction and perhaps even eradication is feasible. Namely, on islands.

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Categories : alien species, Australia, cat, conservation, conservation biology, decline, demography, ecology, economics, environmental economics, extinction, harvest, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, investment, mammal, management, modelling, planning, population dynamics, population viability analysis, predation, predator, research, restoration, South Australia, southern Australia, threatened species

Amphibian conservation in a managed world

1 04 2020

FrogBlog2

Crinia parinsignifera (top) and Limnodynastes tasmaniensis (bottom). Photo: Kate Mason

The amphibian class is diverse, and ranges from worm-like caecilians to tiny frogs that live their entire lives within bromeliads high in the rainforest canopy. Regardless of form or habit, all share the dubious honour of being cited as the world’s most endangered vertebrate taxon, and 41% of the species assessed are threatened with extinction. Rapidly changing climates will further exacerbate this situation as amphibians are expected to be more strongly affected than other vertebrates like birds or mammals.

This peril stems from a physiological dependence on freshwater.

Amphibians breathe (in part) through their skin, so they maintain moist skin surfaces. This sliminess means that most amphibians quickly dry out in dry conditions. Additionally, most amphibian eggs and larvae are fully aquatic. One of the greatest risks to populations are pools that dry too quickly for larval development, which leads to complete reproductive failure.

This need for freshwater all too often places them in direct competition with humans.

To keep pace with population growth, humans have engineered a landscape where the location, and persistence of water is tightly controlled. In seeking water availability for farming and amenity, we all too often remove essential habitats for amphibians and other freshwater fauna.

To protect amphibians from decline and extinction, land managers may need to apply innovative techniques to support vulnerable species. With amphibians’ strong dependence on freshwater, this support can be delivered by intelligently manipulating where and when freshwater appears in the landscape, with an eye to maintaining habitats for breeding, movement and refuge. A range of innovative approaches have been attempted to date, but they are typically developed in isolation and their existence is known only to a cloistered few. A collation of the approaches and their successes (and failures) has not occurred.

In our latest paper, we used a systematic review to classify water-manipulation techniques and to evaluate the support for these approaches. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : amphibian, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, disease, drought, environmental policy, extinction, fish, frog, habitat loss, management, pollution, predation, predator, recovery, restoration, water

How to improve (South Australia’s) biodiversity prospects

9 04 2019

Fig2

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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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

How to fix a broken river

5 04 2019

murraycod

It seems that most of what I do these days is measure, model, or otherwise quantify environmental damage. While I dabble in restoration, occasionally I’m involved in a project that really can make a positive difference.

If you’re an Australian, you’ll know a thing or two about just how much of a clusterfuck our biggest river system has turned into. From mismanagement, to outright theft, to lobbyist-driven over-exploitation, to climate change itself, the Murray-Darling system is now in a right mess.

So, I’ll pretext this post with a caveat — no amount of ecological restoration can ‘fix’ a compromised river if there’s no water in it. Goes without saying, really.

But, if you do have water, then there are things one can do to promote populations of various creatures living in it, like fish.

Dubbed the ‘honeypot effect’ — we have just shown that providing woody habitat, or ‘snags’, for native fish in the Murray River increases population size. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, conservation, conservation ecology, fish, fisheries, Murray cod, Murray River, Murray-Darling, restoration, River Murray, South Australia, southern Australia, water

A call to wings

19 03 2019

This week sees the launch of an updated bat synopsis from Conservation Evidence, adding new studies that have come out since the first synopsis was published in 2013.

The synopsis collects and summarises studies that test conservation actions such as ‘provide bat boxes for roosting bats’, and organises the studies by the action that they test. This focus on solutions makes it a handy point of reference for conservationists wishing to see what might work — and what is unlikely to work — to conserve bats.

Bechstein’s bat – photo credit Claire Wordley

Bechstein’s bat (Myotis bechsteinii) — photo credit Claire Wordley

 

Free to read or download from Conservation Evidence, the update represents a major addition to the original, containing 173 studies to the original 101. Studies are included if they tested an action that could be put in place for conservation, and measured an outcome for bats. As well as adding studies published from 2013 on, the update adds studies originally published in Spanish or Portuguese, and it is hoped that more languages will be added in future editions. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, biodiversity, conservation, development, environmental policy, environmental science, habitat loss, human-wildlife conflict, mammal, management, monitoring, science, South America, tropical

We need a Revegetation Council

14 01 2019
planting trees

As I have discussed before, the greatest threatening process to biodiversity in South Australia today is past and ongoing clearing of native vegetation. So, arresting further vegetation clearing, and restoring previously cleared land to functional native-vegetation communities are easily the highest priorities across the entire State.

Despite some valiant attempts across South Australia to revegetate previously cleared areas1, the haphazard approach to reforestation in South Australia means that we are unlikely to be maximising ecological function and providing the best habitats for native biodiversity. Several improvements in this regard can be made:

(i) Establish a State Register of past, ongoing, and planned revegetation projects, including data on the proponents, area revegetated, species planted, number of individuals planted for each species, monitoring in place (e.g., plant survival, other species using the restored habitat, etc.), and costs (actual or projected). Such a State Register would allow for a more regional coordination of future revegetation projects to suggest potentially more ecologically useful approaches. This could include identifying the most locally suitable species to plant, maximising the area of existing native habitat or restored fragments by planting adjacent to these, joining isolated islands of habitat to increase connectivity, or even to create more efficient projects by combining otherwise independent proponents (e.g., adjacent landholders).

(ii) Establish a State Revegetation Council that uses data from the Register to prioritise projects, enhance collaboration, and suggest improvements in design and placement according to the principles mentioned above. The Council could also help to coordinate monitoring of progress and ecological outcomes at the landscape scale. A similar State Register for Wetland Restoration and a relevant Council could be established in a similar manner, emphasising the conservation and restoration of smaller wetlands with more unique, endemic plant species. Likewise, both Councils could ideally assist in coordinating non-profit and private organisations in terms of their revegetation priorities, as well as coordinate with conservation covenants(see below) for private landholders.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, connectivity, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem function, environmental policy, fragmentation, habitat loss, recovery, reforestation, research, restoration, South Australia

What Works in Conservation 2018

23 05 2018

P1230308

Do you have a copy of this book? If not, why not?

 

This book is free to download. This book contains the evidence for the effectiveness of over 1200 things you might do for conservation. If you don’t have a copy, go and download yourself a free one here, right now, before you even finish reading this article. Seriously. Go. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’ll change your life.

Why you’ll laugh

OK, I may have exaggerated the laughing part. ‘What Works in Conservation 2018’ is a serious and weighty tome, 660 pages of the evidence for 1277 conservation interventions (anything you might do to conserve a species or habitat), assessed by experts and graded into colour-coded categories of effectiveness. This is pretty nerdy stuff, and probably not something you’ll lay down with on the beach or dip into as you enjoy a large glass of scotch (although I don’t know your life, maybe it is).

But that’s not really what it’s meant for. This is intended as a reference book for conservation managers and policymakers, a way to scan through your possible solutions and get a feel for those that are most likely to be effective. Once you have a few ideas in mind, you can follow the links to see the full evidence base for each study at conservationevidence.com, where over 5000 studies have been summarised into digestible paragraphs.

The book takes the form of discrete chapters on taxa, habitats or topics (such as ‘control of freshwater invasives’). Each chapter is split into IUCN threat categories such as ‘Agriculture’ or ‘Energy production and mining’. For each threat there are a series of interventions that could be used to tackle it, and for each of these interventions the evidence has been collated. Experts have then graded the body of the evidence over three rounds of Delphi scoring, looking at the effectiveness, certainty in the evidence (i.e., the quality and quantity of evidence available), and any harms to the target taxa. These scores combine to place each intervention in a category from ‘Beneficial’ to ‘Likely to be ineffective or harmful’. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : amphibian, biodiversity, birds, captive breeding, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, fish, fragmentation, function, governance, impact, invasive species, management, protected area, research, science, threatened species

Bring it back

13 02 2018

fynbos

Protea compacta in fynbos, a form of shrubland at Soetanysberg, South Africa. Photo: Brian van Wilgen

Restoration of lost habitats and ecosystems hits all the right notes — conservation optimism, a can-do attitude, and the excitement of seeing biologically impoverished areas teem with life once more.

The Strategic Plan of the Convention on Biological Diversity includes a target to restore at least 15% of degraded ecosystems. This is being enthusiastically taken up in many places, including through initiatives such as the Bonn Challenge, a global aspiration to restore 350 million hectares of deforested and degraded land by 2030. This is in recognition of the importance of healthy ecosystems in not just conserving biodiversity, but also in combating climate change. Peatlands and forests lock away carbon, while grassland diversity stabilises ecosystem productivity during extreme weather events. So how can we make sure that these restoration efforts are as effective as possible? Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Africa, Australia, biodiversity, biosequestration, biowealth, carbon, climate change, connectivity, conservation, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental engineering, fragmentation, implementation, investment, management, reforestation, restoration

Keeping India’s forests

9 08 2016

I’ve just returned from a short trip to the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, Karnataka, one of India’s elite biological research institutes.

Panorama of a forested landscape (Savandurga monolith in the background) just south of Bangalore, Karnataka (photo: CJA Bradshaw)

Panorama of a forested landscape (Savandurga monolith in the background) just south of Bangalore, Karnataka (photo: CJA Bradshaw)

I was invited to give a series of seminars (you can see the titles here), and hopefully establish some new collaborations. My wonderful hosts, Deepa Agashe & Jayashree Ratnam, made sure I was busy meeting nearly everyone I could in ecology and evolution, and I’m happy to say that collaborations have begun. I also think NCBS will be a wonderful conduit for future students coming to Australia.

It was my first time visiting India1, and I admit that I had many preconceptions about the country that were probably unfounded. Don’t get me wrong — many of them were spot on, such as the glorious food (I particularly liked the southern India cuisine of dhosa, iddly & the various fruit-flavoured semolina concoctions), the insanity of urban traffic, the juxtaposition of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and the politeness of Indian society (Indians have to be some of the politest people on the planet).

But where I probably was most at fault of making incorrect assumptions was regarding the state of India’s natural ecosystems, and in particular its native forests and grasslands. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, Asia, biodiversity, conservation, corruption, decline, deforestation, development, economics, ecosystem, environmental policy, fragmentation, governance, habitat loss, harvest, logging, rain forests

Tropical forest resilience depends on past disturbance frequency

16 07 2014

I’ve recently come across an interesting study that perfectly marries palaeo-ecological data with modern conservation philosophy. It’s not often that such a prehistorical perspective dating at least to the Last Glacial Maximum has been used so effectively to inform future conservation outlooks. I’m particularly interested in this sort of approach considering my own palaeo dabblings of late.

Published in Nature Communications this May, Lydia Cole and colleagues’ paper Recovery and resilience of tropical forests after disturbance is a meta-analysis of 71 studies covering nearly 300 disturbance events in tropical forests over the last 20,000 years or so. Using fossil pollen records as an index of vegetation change, they demonstrated the (somewhat intuitive) main result that the time to recovery following a disturbance generally decreases as the past disturbance frequency increased.

This appears to be a vindication of the idea that a system’s adaptive strategies evolve as a product of the local disturbance regime. More importantly, they found that recovery was faster following ‘large infrequent events’, which are natural perturbations such as cyclones and major fires. While most past disturbances were caused by humans clearing forest, the fact that tropical forest systems were most resilient to ‘natural’ events means that if we can’t stop human disturbances, at least we can attempt to emulate natural processes to maximise the rebound potential. Much like many modern forestry operations try to emulate natural disturbances to limit their damage, we should at least manage our impacts by understanding so-called ‘natural’ regimes as much as possible. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Africa, agriculture, Amazon, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecology, flood, habitat loss, logging, management, recovery, reforestation, research, tropical

A convenient truth: global push for carbon-based conservation

19 05 2014

Eucalyptus viminalis (Manna Gum) - leaf, adultI’ve just written an article for the Australian River Restoration Centre‘s RipRap magazine, and they have given me permission to reproduce it here.

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The brave, new green world of the carbon economy hasn’t exactly taken off as desired. Perhaps it’s because it wasn’t really planned from the outset, or maybe it is still too abstract for most people to accept, digest and incorporate into their daily lives. An emergent property of society’s generally slow awakening to the challenge of climate disruption, is that it will be a long time before we accept its full suite of incarnations.

The infant carbon economy is, however, well and truly alive and kicking, so it is important to try and plan for its growing influence on our decision making. Bumps in the road aside, the carbon economy has mostly been a blessing (actual and potential) for biodiversity conservation projects the world over.

In principle, the aim of the carbon economy is rather straight-forward: charge people a certain amount for each unit of carbon dioxide equivalents they release, and then use that money to develop approaches that further increase carbon sequestration or limit emissions. It’s a ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ framework, where increasing financial impetus to restrict emissions is enhanced by society’s evolution towards better approaches and technology.

The operational side of the carbon economy is unfortunately much more muddled, with vested interests and political gaming weakening its implementation. Nonetheless, we persevere. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, Australia, biocarbon, biodiversity, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, deforestation, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, fire, habitat loss, livestock, logging, management, planning, recovery, reforestation, restoration

Terrestrial biodiversity’s only chance is avoided deforestation

24 01 2014

farming forestsToday I was shocked, stunned and pleasantly (for a change) surprised. Australia has its first ‘avoided deforestation’ carbon farming project.

It is understandable that this sort of news doesn’t make the Jane & Joe Bloggs of the world stand up and cheer, but it should make conservation biologists jump for bloody joy.

So why exactly am I so excited about the setting aside of a mere 9000 ha (90 km2, or 10 × 9 km) of semi-arid scrub in western New South Wales? It’s simple – nothing can replace the biodiversity or carbon value of primary forest. In other words, forest restoration – while laudable and needed – can never achieve what existing forest already does. We know now from various parts of the world that biodiversity is nearly always much higher in primary forest, and that the carbon structure of the forest (especially below-ground carbon) can take centuries to recover.

Another problem with restoration – and if you’ve ever been involved in any tree planting yourself, you’ll know what I mean – is that it’s incredibly expensive, time-consuming and slow. Wouldn’t it make more financial sense just to save forests instead of trying to rebuild them?

Of course it is, so the logical conclusion from a conservation perspective is to save primary forest first, then worry about restoration next. The problem is, there are few, if any, financial incentives for keeping forests standing in the private sector. The stumbling rise of the carbon economy is a potential resolution to this problem, although neither the Kyoto Protocol nor most national carbon-trading schemes adequately account for the carbon value of existing forests.

Up until today, even Australia didn’t have any examples.

Read the rest of this entry »


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Quantity, but not quality – slow recovery of disturbed tropical forests

8 11 2013

tropical regrowthIt is a sobering statistic that most of the world’s tropical forests are not ‘primary’ – that is, those that have not suffered some alteration or disturbance from humans (previously logged, cleared for agriculture, burned, etc.).

Today I highlight a really cool paper that confirms this, plus adds some juicy (and disturbing – pun intended – detail). The paper by Phil Martin and colleagues just published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B came to my attention through various channels – not least of which was their citation of one of our previous papers ;-), as well as a blog post by Phil himself. I was so impressed with it that I made my first Faculty of 1000 Prime recommendation1 of the paper (which should appear shortly).

As we did in 2011 (to which Phil refers as our “soon-to-be-classic work” – thanks!), Martin and colleagues amassed a stunning number of papers investigating the species composition of disturbed and primary forests from around the tropics. Using meta-analysis, they matched disturbed and undisturbed sites, recording the following statistics: Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, carbon, carbon trading, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem, extinction, extinction debt, fragmentation, habitat loss, harvest, living dead, logging, rain forests, recovery, reforestation, restoration, tropical

Help us restore a forest

12 04 2013

plantingI’m not usually one to promote conservation volunteer opportunities, but this is a little different. First, I’m involved in this one, and second, it’s very near to my home. As you might know, the Mount Lofty Ranges area has had about 90 % of its forests destroyed since European settlement, with a corresponding loss of ecosystem services. We need smart restoration on massive scale, and Monarto is one place where we can develop the best practices to achieve this goal. We really do need some help here, so I encourage anyone in the Adelaide area with an interest in evidence-based forest restoration to lend us a hand.

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The Monarto Restoration Project will provide an internationally recognised opportunity to experience and engage with wild Australia as it was.

Our aim is restore and expand habitats at Monarto to represent what used to exist in the region before clearing for agriculture and the introduction of pest species. Monarto used to be teeming with wildlife. The remnant vegetation at Monarto is unique as it is located at the cross-over of two vegetation communities (the Mt Lofty Ranges and Murray Mallee). This means it provides important habitat for a range of threatened bird and plant species. However, there are still a number of species in danger of being lost from the area, so we need to focus on restoring habitat to support them too.

We provide an opportunity to see the bush in a way that is no longer possible in most parts of Australia. We hope to help you see what we have lost and encourage you to participate in conservation. It gives us the opportunity to include everyone in on-ground conservation work and pass on skills that can be applied beyond a day or this project. With your help we can reduce the impacts of pest species on the property and re-introduce some of the native species that are now locally extinct. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biocarbon, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, climate change, conservation, deforestation, habitat loss, monitoring, pollination, reforestation, research, restoration, science, South Australia, southern Australia, The University of Adelaide

Let the planting begin

3 04 2013

A tough little Eucalyptus porosa - one day soon this entire ex-paddock will be filled with carbon-guzzling natives.

A tough little Eucalyptus porosa – one day soon this entire ex-paddock will be filled with carbon-guzzling natives. Note the plot markers in the background.

I had a great morning today checking out the progress of our carbon-biodiversity planting experiment out at Monarto Zoo. What a fantastic effort! Briony Horner and her team have made some amazing progress.

If you haven’t read about what we’re up to, here’s a brief re-cap:

Late last year we were awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project grant in which we proposed to examine experimentally the cost-benefit trade-off between biodiversity and carbon using a replicated planting regime. The approach is quite simple, but it will take many years to pay off. What we are asking is: how many different species and in what densities are required to restore a native woodland from an over-grazed paddock that provide the biggest long-term biodiversity and carbon benefits simultaneously for the lowest costs?

Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, biocarbon, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, reforestation, restoration, South Australia

Restoring doomed fish

24 08 2012

I get called a doomsday merchant a lot, mainly because there’s not a lot of good news out there when it comes to biodiversity these days. However, now and again there is a success story worth shouting from the rooftops. This latest post comes from my PhD student, Jarod Lyon (also of the Arthur Rylah Institute in Victoria), who is working on restoring native freshwater fish in Australia’s largest river system – the Murray-Darling. The M-D also happens to be in a lot of trouble because of poor water management and years of neglect. However, some clever research and restoration proves that we can bring biodiversity back from the brink if done right. Jarod has posted here on Conservation Bytes before describing his work, and this latest post provides some detail on one species in particular.

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Trout cod Maccullochella macquariensis were once considered to be widespread in the southern tributaries of the Murray-Darling Basin. However over the past fifty years, their distribution and abundance have declined dramatically, due to a number of disturbances including habitat loss, altered flow and temperature patterns, in-stream sedimentation, population fragmentation due to in-stream barriers and over fishing. Trout cod are listed nationally as endangered under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act 1999) and listed under the Victorian Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act (FFG Act 1988). Trout cod are often accidentally caught when fishing for Murray cod. However, it is illegal to take a trout cod while angling.

Trout cod were historically abundant in the lower Ovens River system in South-Eastern Australia, however were locally extinct by the 1980s. In an attempt to re-introduce a viable population in the Ovens River, hatchery-reared juvenile trout cod were stocked in the Ovens River system for ten years starting in 1997. Our recent manuscript published in Marine and Freshwater Research assesses the success of this stocking regime (particularly in relation to recovery plan objectives) through a variety of techniques, including fish surveys and analysis of gonads, otoliths and genetic structure of the population.

We found that the Ovens River now holds a naturally self-sustaining population of trout cod – that is, the progeny of stocked fishes are now breeding.  Given that most threatened species re-introduction programs worldwide fail, this is somewhat of a good-news story for management of rare animals. In particular, we found that the length of the stocking program was a major factor in its success, as the long time period overcame the years where the survival of the stocked fingerlings was low. Interestingly, most fish to recruit to an adult size were stocked in 2003 or 2004 – meaning if this had been a five-year program, it would most likely have failed. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, conservation, decline, fish, fisheries, genetics, habitat loss, management, Murray cod, research, resnagging, restoration, River Murray, southern Australia, trout cod

How to restore a tropical rain forest

6 11 2009

thiakiHere’s a little story for you about how a casual chat over a glass of wine (or many) can lead to great scientific endeavours.

A few years ago I was sitting in the living room of my good friends Noel Preece and Penny van Oosterzee in Darwin chatting about life, the universe, and everything. They rather casually mentioned that they would be selling their environmental consulting company and their house and moving to the Queensland rain forest. Ok – sounded like a pretty hippy thing to do when you’re thinking about ‘retiring’ (only from the normal grindstone, at least). But it wasn’t about the easy life away from it all (ok, partially, perhaps) – they wanted to do something with their reasonably large (181 ha), partially deforested (51-ha paddock) property investment. By ‘something’, I mean science.

So they asked me – how would we go about getting money to investigate the best way to reforest a tropical rain forest? I had no idea. As it turns out, no one really knows how to restore rain forests properly. Sure, planting trees happens a lot, but the random, willy-nilly, unquantified ways in which it is done means that no one can tell you what the biggest biodiversity bang for your buck is, or even if it can compete on the carbon sequestration front.

Why carbon sequestration? Well, in case you’ve had your head up your bum for the last decade, one of the major carbon mitigating schemes going is the offset idea – for every tonne of carbon you emit as a consumer, you (or more commonly, someone else you pay) plant a certain number of trees (because trees need carbon to grow and so suck it out of the atmosphere). Nice idea, but if you deforest native ecosystems just to bash up quick-growing monoculture plantations of (usually) exotic species with little benefit to native biota, biodiversity continues to spiral down the extinction vortex. So, there has to be a happy medium, and there has to be a way to measure it.

So I said to Penny and Noel “Why don’t we bash together a proposal and get some experts in the field involved and submit it to the Australian Research Council (ARC) for funding?” They thought that was a smashing idea, and so we did.

Fast forward a few years and … success! The Thiaki Project was born (‘Thiaki’ is the name of the Creek flowing through the property north of Atherton – seems to be of Greek origin). We were extremely lucky to find a new recruit to the University of Queensland, Dr. Margie Mayfield (who worked previously with Paul Ehrlich), who was not only an expert in the area of tropical reforestation for biodiversity, she also had the time and energy to lead the project. We garnered several other academic and industry partners and came up with a pretty sexy experiment that is just now getting underway thanks to good old Mr. ARC.

The project is fairly ambitious, even though the experiments per se are fairly straight forward. We’re using a randomised block design where we are testing 3 tree diversity treatments (monoculture, 1 species each from 6 families, and 5 species each from those same 6 families) and two planting densities (high and low). The major objective is to see what combination of planting density and native tree species provides the most habitat for the most species. We’re starting small, looking mainly at various insects as they start to use the newly planted blocks, but might expand the assessments (before planting and after) to reptiles, amphibians and possibly birds later on.

But we’re not stopping there – we were fortunate enough to get get a clever soil scientist, Dr. David Chittleborough of the University of Adelaide, involved so we could map the change in soil carbon during the experiment. Our major challenge is to find the right combination of tree species and planting techniques that restore native biodiversity the most effectively, all the while maximising carbon sequestration from the growing forest. And of course, we’re trying to do this as most cost-effectively as we can – measuring the relative costs will give landowners contemplating reforestation the scale of expenditures expected.

I’m pretty proud of what Margie, Noel, Penny and the rest of the team have accomplished so far, and what’s planned. Certainly the really exciting results are years away yet, but stay tuned – Thiaki could become the model for tropical reforestation worldwide. Follow the Thiaki Project website for regular updates.

I’d also love to recreate the Thiaki Project in southern Australia because as it turns out, no one knows how to maximise biodiversity and carbon sequestration for the lowest cost in temperate reforestation projects either. All we need is a few hundred hectares of deforested land (shouldn’t be hard to find), about $1 million to start, and a bit of time. Any takers?

CJA Bradshaw

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© C. Madden


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Categories : Australia, biocarbon, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, rain forests, reforestation, restoration, southern Australia, The University of Adelaide

Woodland Recovery Initiative

12 03 2009

golden wattle (Acacia pycnantha)I’m recommending you view a video presentation (can be accessed by clicking the link below) by A/Prof. David Paton which demonstrates the urgency of reforesting the region around Adelaide. Glenthorne is a 208-ha property 17 km south of the Adelaide’s central business district owned and operated by the University of Adelaide. A major revegetation project called the Woodland Recovery Initative is being organised to achieve the following:

  • reclaim approximately 100 ha of farmland and reconstruct a suitable habitat that encourages the return of native species
  • establish a world-class research centre
  • employ scientists, technicians, teachers and managers to deliver research, educational, community engagement, monitoring and on-ground works
  • develop educational programs that involve local schools in the environmental works, so that young South Australians are engaged in the project and see it as important to the future of their community

In my view, this is a really exciting opportunity to test experimentally the best ways to restore woodlands to maximise biodiversity retention. Once revegetated, the Glenthorne property will link existing reserves to maximise forested area (and as we know, increasing habitat area is one of most effective ways to prevent extinction). The next step is to apply the knowledge gained from the long-term experimentation at Glenthorne to revegetate the regions surrounding Adelaide that have suffered 200 years of heavy deforestation.

I strongly encourage local support of this initiative – it’s not only biodiversity that will benefit – ecosystem services on which the human residents of the greater Adelaide region depend (including extremely important things such as water retention and carbon sequestration) will also be efficiently enhanced by evidence-based ecological restoration of the region. We could certainly use better natural water retention and more carbon sequestration in addition to the re-establishment of many extirpated native species!

VIEW VIDEO BY CLICKING HERE

CJA Bradshaw


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Categories : carbon, climate change, conservation, deforestation, fragmentation, habitat loss, recovery, reforestation, restoration, The University of Adelaide, video


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