2023 Publications
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Richardson LS, Fuller RA, Stewart DA, McDonald JA, Robertson K & Oswald SA (2023) Saving our seabirds: Variable breeding success of Red-tailed Tropicbirds in the Great Barrier Reef reveals the need for robust monitoring Emu, 123, e02659.
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Quantifying nest success for seabirds breeding in remote offshore islands can be logistically challenging, especially for species with protracted breeding phenologies. Thus, any monitoring program must be robust to these challenges, but few studies have reported evaluations of survey design, monitoring frequency, and methods for estimating nesting success for such species. We explored whether the current monitoring program for Red-tailed Tropicbirds (Phaethon rubricauda) on Raine Island, Great Barrier Reef, Australia, enabled accurate estimates of nesting success. We use three different approaches to produce the first estimates of nesting success from data collected by this monitoring program. Annual nesting success for Red-tailed Tropicbirds was low at Raine Island, estimated as between 24.3% and 30.6%, indicating that further study is warranted to identify possible causes. However, our study illustrates possible pitfalls of the monitoring program, and we propose three critical considerations (maximising per-nest observations, standardising timing of visits, and using automated technologies) that would improve the ability of monitoring programs to estimate nesting success for seabirds with protracted breeRead the paper onlineding phenologies. Use of such modifications in monitoring programs will improve our ability to diagnose the causes of population declines for seabirds in the Great Barrier Reef.
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Zhang X, Jin X, Fuller RA, Liang X, Fan Y & Zhou Y (2023) Using modern portfolio theory to enhance ecosystem service delivery: A case study from China. Journal of Environmental Management, 347, 119064.
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Land management strategies often prioritize agricultural supply services at the expense of other ecosystem services. To achieve a high and steady supply of multiple ecosystem services, it is essential to optimize land management practices in areas suitable for agriculture. However, many studies on land management tend to focus on their benefits to ecosystem service delivery without adequately considering the potential risks to other services that might be involved. Here we use modern portfolio theory to quantitatively measure benefits and risks from land management strategies to enhance ecosystem services. We create seven land management scenarios that balance different kinds of ecosystem services in different ways in the agricultural production area of Maoming, Guangdong Province, China. The method yielded optimal portfolios of land management patterns that enhanced ecosystem services while reducing risk as much as possible. This includes a scenario delivering a 22% increase in agricultural production service, while simultaneously increasing the provision of nature-related ecosystem services by 2%. However, no optimization scenario was perfect, and there was always a trade-off between gaining certain ecosystem service benefits and creating a risk of losing others. Our portfolio theory approach reveals that it is essential to consider both the benefits and risks of land management strategies.
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Zhao S, Wang T, Li X, Xu H, Liu N, Xu A, Fuller RA & Li B (2023) Comparing different management strategies of river mouths for waterbird conservation: a case study along the Yellow Sea coast Global Ecology and Conservation, 47, e02659.
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Coastlines with extensive estuaries and broad tidal flats are acutely vulnerable to coastal development. The tidal wetlands of the Yellow Sea are globally important for waterbirds, yet river mouths have disproportionately been developed as industrial ports, fishing ports, or have become abandoned fishing ports, with the type of management strategies depending on biophysical attributes and regional economic drivers. However, river mouths also support extensive upper tidal flat ecosystems, in contrast to many open coastal regions of the Yellow Sea, where reclamation has excised many of the upper tidal flats and dramatically reduced the time that tidal flats are available for foraging and roosting waterbirds each day. However, the extent to which waterbirds disproportionately occurs in river mouths compared to the open coast in the region remains unclear. We used a paired survey design to quantify the waterbird communities and habitat attributes (i.e., areas of upper tidal flats, Spartina alterniflora, and human activity) of 15 river mouths and 15 otherwise similar adjacent open coasts areas along the Yellow Sea coast. Waterbird species richness and abundance were higher in river mouths than open coasts. Among river mouths, the most species rich waterbird communities occurred in fishing ports and the most species poor in industrial ports. Notably, upper tidal flats were absent in many of the open coast regions, which had been subject to reclamation. Our results suggest that river mouths, especially those river mouths currently used as fishing ports, are probably of crucial importance for waterbird conservation on the Jiangsu coast due to their larger areas of upper tidal flats. Our work highlights the need to ensure that the tidal flats in river mouth systems are effectively protected to promote the completion of the annual cycle of migratory waterbirds.
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Schwarzkopf L, Roe P, Mcdonald PG, Watson DM, Fuller RA & Allen-Ankins S (2023) Can an acoustic observatory contribute to conservation of threatened species? Austral Ecology, 48, 1230-1237.
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Observatories are designed to collect data for a range of uses. The Australian Acoustic Observatory (A2O) was established to collect environmental sound, including audible species calls, from 344 recorders at 86 sites around Australia. We examine the potential of the A2O to monitor near threatened, threatened, endangered and critically endangered species, based on their vocal behaviour, geographic distributions in relation to the sites of the A2O and on some knowledge of habitat use. Using IUCN and EPBC lists of threatened and endangered species, we extracted species that vocalized in the audible range, and using conservative estimates of their geographic ranges, determined whether there was a possibility of hearing them at these sites. We found that it may be possible to detect up to 171 threatened species at sites established for the A2O, and that individual sites have the potential to detect up to 40 threatened species. All 86 sites occurred in locations where threatened species could possibly be detected, and the list of detectable species included birds, amphibians, and mammals. We have incidentally detected one mammal and four bird species in the data during other work. Threatening processes to which potentially detectable species were exposed included all but two IUCN threat categories. We concluded that with applications of technology to search the audio data from the A2O, it could serve as an important tool for monitoring threatened species.
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Chowdhury S, Fuller RA, Rokonuzzaman M, Alam S, Das P, Siddika A, Ahmed S, Labi MM, Chowdhury SU, Mukul SA, Böhm M & Hanson JO (2023) Insights from citizen science reveal priority areas for conserving biodiversity in Bangladesh. One Earth, 6, 1315-1325.
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The tropics contain a vast majority of species, yet our understanding of tropical biodiversity is limited. Here we combine species locality data from scientific databases and social media to examine the coverage of species by existing protected areas in Bangladesh and identify priority areas for future expansion. Although protected areas cover 4.6% of Bangladesh, only five species (0.004% of 1,097 species) are adequately represented, and 22 species are entirely absent from the existing protected-area system, including seven threatened species. Our spatial prioritization identified priority areas comprising 39% of Bangladesh, mainly in the northeast and southeast. The most irreplaceable areas (top 10%) are in hill forests and, to a lesser extent, agricultural landscapes. Our findings inform conservation policies for the Bangladesh government in order to meet the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework targets. In general, the approach can be broadly applicable to countries with limited data in global biodiversity repositories.
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Ordóñez Barona C, Sonkkila C, Baumann JM, Threlfall CG, Hochuli DF, Fuller RA, Davern M & Livesley SJ (2023) The role of diverse cultural identities in the perceived value of urban forests in Melbourne, Australia, and implications for urban ecosystem research and practice. Ecology and Society, 28, 3.
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Urban nature management is usually guided by the most common, frequently mentioned, or easily elicited perceptions expressed by a dominant cultural group. This is unlikely to encourage widespread community support or foster urban nature stewardship in the long run. Considering how people representing diverse cultural identities perceive the value of urban nature is key to meeting diverse community needs. In this study we explore how people not born in Australia, people who speak a language-other-than-English (LOTE), and people who self-identify as speaking a minority language, perceive the value of urban treed sites, trees at these sites, and the wildlife at these sites. We used an intercept questionnaire to collect empirical perception data, delivered in 12 different sites, including parks and streets, located in and near the Greater Melbourne Area, an ethno-culturally diverse urban area in the state of Victoria, Australia. We analyzed 1127 responses collected over 2 years using contingency- and regression-based procedures. We found that people who were not born in Australia rated the importance of treed sites and trees at these sites higher than other respondents, and LOTE respondents rated the importance of treed sites and trees at these sites lower than other respondents. Also, LOTE and some language minority respondents associated more psychological themes (i.e., stress reduction, feeling good) with treed sites than other respondents. These differences account for the influence of other cognitive, behavioral, and social-ecological context factors, such as nature relatedness, knowledge of trees, exposure to trees, demographics, and type of site (i.e., parks or streets). We discuss what these results mean for urban nature research with consideration of diverse cultural communities in cities, including integrating cultural diversity as a complement to the dominant consideration of socioeconomic patterns for understanding urban nature dynamics, accounting for conflicting values, and better communicating with and engaging these communities.
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Lloyd TJ, Oliveira U, Soares-Filho BS, Fuller RA, Butt N, Ascher JS, Barbosa JPPP, Batista JAN, Brescovit AD, de Carvalho CJB, De Marco P, Ferro VG, Fortes Leite FS, Löwenberg-Neto P, Paglia AP, Teixeira de Rezende D, Santos AJ, Silva DP, Ferreira de Vasconcelos M & Sonter LJ (2023) Multiple facets of biodiversity are threatened by mining-induced land-use change in the Brazilian Amazon. Diversity and Distributions, 29, 1190-1204.
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Aim: Mining is increasingly pressuring areas of critical importance for biodiversity conservation, such as the Brazilian Amazon. Biodiversity data are limited in the tropics, restricting the scope for risks to be appropriately estimated before mineral licensing decisions are made. As the distributions and range sizes of other taxa differ markedly from those of vertebrates—the common proxy for analysis of risk to biodiversity from mining—whether mining threatens lesser-studied taxonomic groups differentially at a regional scale is unclear.
Location: Brazilian Amazon.
Methods: We assess risks to several facets of biodiversity from industrial mining by comparing mining areas (within 70 km of an active mining lease) and areas unaffected by mining, employing species richness, species endemism, phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic endemism metrics calculated for angiosperms, arthropods and vertebrates.
Results: Mining areas contained higher densities of species occurrence records than the unaffected landscape, and we accounted for this sampling bias in our analyses. None of the four biodiversity metrics differed between mining and nonmining areas for vertebrates. For arthropods, species endemism was greater in mined areas. Mined areas also had greater angiosperm species richness, phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic endemism, although less species endemism than unmined areas.
Main Conclusions: Unlike for vertebrates, facets of angiosperm and arthropod diversity are relatively higher in areas of mining activity, underscoring the need to consider multiple taxonomic groups and biodiversity facets when assessing risk and evaluating management options for mining threats. Particularly concerning is the proximity of mining to areas supporting deep evolutionary history, which may be impossible to recover or replace. As pressures to expand mining in the Amazon grow, impact assessments with broader taxonomic reach and metric focus will be vital to conserving biodiversity in mining regions.
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Wilson JP, Amano T & Fuller RA (2023) Drone-induced flight initiation distances for shorebirds in mixed-species flocks. Journal of Applied Ecology, 60, 1816-1827.
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1. Drone use has increased in the last decade prompting management efforts to regulate flights near vulnerable wildlife; however, these efforts are hindered by a lack of data characterising drone-induced wildlife disturbance. Many shorebird populations are rapidly declining and efforts to survey them can be hampered by the inaccessibility of their habitat. Drone surveys might overcome this barrier, although there is a risk that increased drone use near shorebirds may cause disturbance and exacerbate declines. We characterise drone-induced disturbance for mixed-species shorebird flocks to inform the management of drones near shorebirds.
2. We conducted 240 drone approaches of mixed-species flocks containing roosting non-breeding shorebirds in Moreton Bay, eastern Australia. We performed approaches horizontally at varying vertical distances and recorded metrics characterising the drone, flock and environment. This enabled us to estimate the factors influencing disturbance as well as the distance of an approaching drone at which the flock is likely to take flight.
3. We determined the drone-induced flight initiation distance for 12 species of waterbird, including seven shorebird species. We could not approach Eastern Curlew Numenius madagascariensis at any vertical distance below the recreational drone limit of 120 m without inducing flight; however, for all other species, there was less than 20% probability that they would take flight when approached by a drone at vertical distances above 60 m. We do not recommend approaches below 30 m. We also found that flight initiation of mixed-species flocks is largely dictated by the most sensitive species present, and that disturbance generally increases with approach velocity, drone noise/size, decreasing distance, and if the drone is obscured by trees.
4. Policy Implications. We conclude that (i) drone use needs to be carefully regulated to ensure roosting shorebird flocks are not approached within distances that will disturb the most sensitive species likely to be present, (ii) researchers contemplating drone surveys need to carefully evaluate the risk of disturbance, especially where there are mixed-species flocks, and (iii) that alternatives to drone surveys should be sought wherever disturbance data for the species potentially encountered are unavailable.
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Ordóñez C, Threlfall CG, Kendal D, Baumann J, Sonkkila C, Hochuli DF, van der Ree R, Fuller RA, Davern M, Herzog K, English A & Livesley SJ (2023) Quantifying the importance of urban trees to people and nature through tree removal experiments. People and Nature, 5, 1316-1335.
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1. Experimentally manipulating urban tree abundance and structure can help explore the complex and reciprocal interactions among people, biodiversity and the services urban forests provide to humans and wildlife.
2. In this study we take advantage of scheduled urban tree removals to experimentally quantify the benefits that urban trees provide to humans and wildlife. Specifically, we aim to understand how trees affect: (1) bird and mammal abundance and diversity, as well as an ecological process (predation); and (2) people’s perception responses, such as the importance that people assign to the trees, wildlife and the site.
3. We designed two independent Before-after-control-impact (BACI) experiments based on two sites where tree removals were occurring (impact sites): an urban park and a residential street, both located in the Greater Melbourne Area, Australia. We selected three control sites for each impact site, or four per experiment. Ecological data were collected through field surveys, and social data on people’s perceptions through intercept questionnaires among park and street users. Data were analysed using a GLMMs to determine the combined effect of time (before and after) and treatment (impact and controls).
4. At the urban park, the abundance of nectarivorous birds and possums both declined by 62% following tree removal, while invertebrate predation increased by 82.1%. The level of importance people assigned to the urban park and to the trees at the site decreased after tree removal, and people’s attitudes towards tree planting became more positive, meaning more people wanted to plant more trees at the site.
5. None of these changes were observed in the street experiment where fewer and smaller trees were removed, suggesting that effects may be highly specific to context, where factors such as tree volume, diversity and arrangement influence the magnitude of social–ecological effects observed.
6. By demonstrating the social–ecological effect of removing urban trees, we provide evidence that urban trees provide critical habitat to urban wildlife and are perceived as an important aspect of the human experience of urban nature.
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Lin D-L, Maron M, Amano T, Chang A-Y & Fuller RA (2023) Using empirical data analysis and expert opinion to identify farmland-associated bird species from their habitat associations. Ibis, 165, 974-985.
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Agricultural expansion is a pervasive threat to biodiversity, and intensification of farming activities can reduce the diversity and abundance of farmland-associated species. Tracking these changes to monitor and manage the biodiversity impacts of farming requires identification of farmland-associated species – a well-established category in Europe and North America, but little-documented elsewhere. Here we develop an integrated approach using empirical data analysis and expert opinion to delineate farmland-associated bird species in Taiwan. We investigated the relationship between land use variables and the abundance of 129 bird species from the Taiwan Breeding Bird Survey. We also administered a questionnaire to 24 expert birdwatchers as an alternative method for estimating the habitat associations of the 129 bird species. The classifications of 104 species into habitat association classes using the two methods were well aligned, with 75 species (72.1%) classified consistently. Only two species (1.9%) were discordantly classified. We could not confidently assign 25 species to any category through empirical data analysis, but expert opinion allowed a qualitative identification of their habitat associations. The two different approaches enabled us to identify farmland-associated species in a consistent way, increasing confidence that where empirical data were insufficient, expert opinion might suffice. Identifying Taiwan’s farmland-associated species using expert opinion, validated by the empirical analysis, paves the way for exploring the status of the group, how agricultural intensification affects it, and the effectiveness of conservation interventions in rapidly changing agricultural landscapes.
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Chowdhury S, Aich U, Rokonuzzaman M, Alam S, Das P, Siddika A, Ahmed S, Labi MM, Di Marco M, Fuller RA & Callaghan CT (2023) Increasing biodiversity knowledge through social media: A case study from tropical Bangladesh. BioScience, 73, 453-459.
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Citizen science programs are becoming increasingly popular among naturalists but remain heavily biased taxonomically and geographically. However, with the explosive popularity of social media and the near-ubiquitous availability of smartphones, many post wildlife photographs on social media. Here, we illustrate the potential of harvesting these data to enhance our biodiversity understanding using Bangladesh, a tropical biodiverse country, as a case study. We compared biodiversity records extracted from Facebook with those from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), collating geospatial records for 1013 unique species, including 970 species from Facebook and 712 species from GBIF. Although most observation records were biased toward major cities, the Facebook records were more evenly spatially distributed. About 86% of the Threatened species records were from Facebook, whereas the GBIF records were almost entirely Of Least Concern species. To reduce the global biodiversity data shortfall, a key research priority now is the development of mechanisms for extracting and interpreting social media biodiversity data.
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Simmonds JS, Suarez-Castro AF, Reside AE, Watson JEM, Allan JR, Atkinson SC, Borrelli P, Dudley N, Edwards S, Fuller RA, Game ET, Linke S, Maxwell SL, Panagos P, Puydarrieux P, Quétier F, Runting RK, Santini T, Sonter LJ & Maron M (2023) Retaining natural vegetation to safeguard biodiversity and humanity. Conservation Biology, 37, e14040.
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Global efforts to deliver internationally agreed goals to reduce carbon emissions, halt biodiversity loss, and retain essential ecosystem services have been poorly integrated. These goals rely in part on preserving natural (e.g., native, largely unmodified) and seminatural (e.g., low intensity or sustainable human use) forests, woodlands, and grasslands. To show how to unify these goals, we empirically derived spatially explicit, quantitative, area-based targets for the retention of natural and seminatural (e.g., native) terrestrial vegetation worldwide. We used a 250-m-resolution map of natural and seminatural vegetation cover and, from this, selected areas identified under different international agreements as being important for achieving global biodiversity, carbon, soil, and water targets. At least 67 million km2 of Earth’s terrestrial vegetation (∼79% of the area of vegetation remaining) required retention to contribute to biodiversity, climate, soil, and freshwater conservation objectives under 4 United Nations’ resolutions. This equates to retaining natural and seminatural vegetation across at least 50% of the total terrestrial (excluding Antarctica) surface of Earth. Retention efforts could contribute to multiple goals simultaneously, especially where natural and seminatural vegetation can be managed to achieve cobenefits for biodiversity, carbon storage, and ecosystem service provision. Such management can and should co-occur and be driven by people who live in and rely on places where natural and sustainably managed vegetation remains in situ and must be complemented by restoration and appropriate management of more human-modified environments if global goals are to be realized.
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Gallo-Cajiao E, Lieberman S, Dolšak N, Prakash A, Labonté R, Biggs D, Franklin C, Morrison TH, Viens AM, Fuller RA, Aguiar R, Fidelman P, Watson JEM, Aenishaenslin C & Wiktorowicz M (2023) Global governance for pandemic prevention and the wildlife trade. Lancet Planetary Health, 7, e336-e345.
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Although ideas about preventive actions for pandemics have been advanced during the COVID-19 crisis, there has been little consideration for how they can be operationalised through governance structures within the context of the wildlife trade for human consumption. To date, pandemic governance has mostly focused on outbreak surveillance, containment, and response rather than on avoiding zoonotic spillovers in the first place. However, given the acceleration of globalisation, a paradigm shift towards prevention of zoonotic spillovers is warranted as containment of outbreaks becomes unfeasible. Here, we consider the current institutional landscape for pandemic prevention in light of ongoing negotiations of a so-called pandemic treaty and how prevention of zoonotic spillovers from the wildlife trade for human consumption could be incorporated. We argue that such an institutional arrangement should be explicit about zoonotic spillover prevention and focus on improving coordination across four policy domains, namely public health, biodiversity conservation, food security, and trade. We posit that this pandemic treaty should include four interacting goals in relation to prevention of zoonotic spillovers from the wildlife trade for human consumption: risk understanding, risk assessment, risk reduction, and enabling funding. Despite the need to keep political attention on addressing the current pandemic, society cannot afford to miss the opportunity of the current crisis to encourage institution building for preventing future pandemics.
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Shumway N, Saunders MI, Nicol S, Fuller RA, Ben-Moshe N, Iwamura T, Kim SW, Murray NJ, Watson JEM & Maron M (2023) Exploring the risks and benefits of flexibility in biodiversity offset location in a case study of migratory shorebirds. Conservation Biology, 37, e14031.
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Biodiversity offsets aim to counterbalance the residual impacts of development on species and ecosystems. Guidance documents explicitly recommend that biodiversity offset actions be located close to the location of impact because of higher potential for similar ecological conditions, but allowing greater spatial flexibility has been proposed. We examined the circumstances under which offsets distant from the impact location could be more likely to achieve no net loss or provide better ecological outcomes than offsets close to the impact area. We applied a graphical model for migratory shorebirds in the East Asian–Australasian Flyway as a case study to explore the problems that arise when incorporating spatial flexibility into offset planning. Spatially flexible offsets may alleviate impacts more effectively than local offsets; however, the risks involved can be substantial. For our case study, there were inadequate data to make robust conclusions about the effectiveness and equivalence of distant habitat-based offsets for migratory shorebirds. Decisions around offset placement should be driven by the potential to achieve equivalent ecological outcomes; however, when considering more distant offsets, there is a need to evaluate the likely increased risks alongside the potential benefits. Although spatially flexible offsets have the potential to provide more cost-effective biodiversity outcomes and more cobenefits, our case study showed the difficulty of demonstrating these benefits in practice and the potential risks that need to be considered to ensure effective offset placement.
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Lin D-L, Tsai C-Y, Pursner S, Chao J, Lyu A, Amano T, Maron M, Lin R-S, Lin K-H, Chiang K-K, Lin Y-L, Lu L-C, Chang A-Y, Chen W-J & Fuller RA (2023) Remote and local threats are associated with population change in Taiwanese migratory waterbirds. Global Ecology and Conservation, 42, e02402.
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Although several countries along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway have recently begun reporting population trends and identifying threats to migratory waterbirds, there remains rather sparse geographical coverage of systematic waterbird monitoring, impeding our understanding of the flyway-wide status of waterbird populations. To fill this gap, we used the data from a nationwide citizen science project, the “Taiwan New Year Bird Count” to examine recent population trends of 31 migratory waterbird species across Taiwan, and within three of its waterbird hotspot regions, between 2014 and 2021. Island-wide, the abundance of two species declined significantly while five species increased. However, there was substantial heterogeneity in population trends among regions, with nine species declining significantly in Yi-Lan, four species in Chang-Hua and one species in Chia-Nan. Conversely, 11 species increased significantly in Chia-Nan, one species in Chang-Hua, but no species increased in Yi-Lan. This suggests that a combination of local and remote factors is driving population change in Taiwanese migratory waterbirds. Moreover, species that use local rice paddies or are dependent on tidal flats around the Yellow Sea were more likely to show population declines, and those able to use aquacultural wetlands showed growth. These results suggest that recent rice paddy loss and habitat loss in the Yellow Sea have been contributing to migratory waterbird declines in Taiwanese wetlands. Our findings suggest that local land use planning policies within Taiwan as well as mitigation of Yellow Sea tidal flat loss are likely to be complementary in safeguarding the future of migratory waterbirds in Taiwan.
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Shi X, Hu C, Soderholm J, Chapman J, Mao H, Cui K, Ma Z, Wu D & Fuller RA (2023) Prospects for monitoring bird migration along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway using weather radar. Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, 9, 169–181.
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Each year, billions of birds migrate across the globe, and interpretation of weather radar signals is increasingly being used to document the spatial and temporal migration patterns in Europe and America. Such approaches are yet to be applied in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF), one of the most species-rich and threatened flyways in the world. Logistical challenges limit direct on-ground monitoring of migratory birds in many parts of the EAAF, resulting in knowledge gaps on population status and site use that limit evidence-based conservation planning. Weather radar data have great potential for achieving comprehensive migratory bird monitoring along the EAAF. In this study, we discuss the feasibility and challenges of using weather radar to complement on-ground bird migration surveys in the flyway. We summarize the location, capacity and data availability of weather radars across EAAF countries, as well as the spatial coverage of the radars with respect to migrants’ geographic distribution and migration hotspots along the flyway, with an exemplar analysis of biological movement patterns extracted from Chinese weather radars. There are more than 430 weather radars in EAAF countries, covering on average half of bird species’ passage and non-breeding distributions, as well as 70% of internationally important sites for migratory shorebirds. We conclude that the weather radar network could be a powerful resource for monitoring bird movements over the full annual cycle throughout much of the EAAF, providing estimates of migration traffic rates, site use, and long-term population trends, especially in remote and less-surveyed regions. Analyses of weather radar data would complement existing ornithological surveys and help understand the past and present status of the avian community in a highly threatened flyway.
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Ren X, Zhang S, Huang K, Peng H-B, Li C, Zhao D, Pang D, Wu Y, Liu P, Chen P, Hou R, Fuller RA, Hua F & & Que P (2023) Habitat selection and population status of breeding Wood Snipe Gallinago nemoricola in an alpine meadow in Sichuan, China. Bird Conservation International, 33, e54.
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The Wood Snipe Gallinago nemoricola is one of the least known shorebird species, and its habitat associations are very poorly understood. Here we provide the first assessment of the habitat use of the Wood Snipe during the breeding season. Between May and July 2021 at a 4-km2 alpine meadow in Sichuan province, China, we conducted population surveys and behavioural observations to identify sites where breeding Wood Snipe occurred and foraged. We quantified the habitat characteristics and food resource availability of these sites and compared them with randomly selected “background” sites. Comparison between 34 occurrence sites and 25 background sites indicated that during the breeding season, Wood Snipes are not distributed evenly across alpine meadow habitats, but preferred habitats in the lower part (3,378–3,624 m) of the alpine meadow with intermediate levels of soil moisture. In addition, comparison between 17 foraging sites and 24 background sites showed that the Wood Snipe tended to forage at sites with higher soil fauna abundance. We found weak evidence for denser vegetation cover at its height and no evidence for other biotic habitat variables such as vegetation composition or other abiotic habitat variables such as slope, soil penetrability, or disturbance level to influence Wood Snipe habitat associations. Our results suggest that the actual distribution range of the Wood Snipe during the breeding season may be smaller than expected from the extent of apparently suitable habitat. We advise caution in evaluating the potential habitat availability and distribution of the Wood Snipe, and call for further research to better understand the ecology of this rare species to inform its conservation.
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Allen-Ankins S, McKnight DT, Nordberg EJ, Hoefer S, Roe P, Watson DM, McDonald PG, Fuller RA & Schwarzkopf L (2023) Effectiveness of acoustic indices as indicators of vertebrate biodiversity. Ecological Indicators, 147, 109937.
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Effective monitoring tools are key for tracking biodiversity loss and informing management intervention strategies. Passive acoustic monitoring promises to provide a cheap and effective way to monitor biodiversity across large spatial and temporal scales, however, extracting useful information from long-duration audio recordings still proves challenging. Recently, a range of acoustic indices have been developed, which capture different aspects of the soundscape, and may provide a way to estimate traditional biodiversity measures. Here we investigated the relationship between 13 acoustic indices obtained from passive acoustic monitoring and biodiversity estimates of various vertebrate taxonomic groupings obtained from manual surveys at six sites spanning over 20 degrees of latitude along the Australian east coast. We found a number of individual acoustic indices that correlated well with species richness, Shannon’s diversity index, and total individual count estimates obtained from traditional survey methods. Correlations were typically greater for avian and total vertebrate biodiversity than for anuran and non-avian vertebrate biodiversity. Acoustic indices also correlated better with species richness and total individual count than with Shannon’s diversity index. Random forest models incorporating multiple acoustic indices provided more accurate predictions than single indices alone. Out of the acoustic indices tested, cluster count, mid-frequency cover and spectral density contributed the greatest predictive ability to models. Our results suggest that models incorporating multiple acoustic indices could be a useful tool for monitoring certain vertebrate groups. Further work is required to understand how site-specific variables can be incorporated into models to improve predictive capabilities and how to improve the monitoring of taxa besides avians, particularly anurans.
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Derez CM & Fuller RA (2023) The reptile relocation industry in Australia: Perspectives from operators. Diversity, 15, 343.
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Thousands of reptiles are relocated annually in Australia, yet there has been relatively little research aimed at understanding how the reptile relocation industry operates. An online questionnaire was distributed to anyone who had relocated a reptile between April 2019 and April 2020, including wildlife relocators, wildlife rehabilitators and the general public. The questionnaire explored demographics, decision-making and concerns about how the industry functions, through 24 questions and two opportunities to provide open-ended comments. We received 125 responses and 123 comments from operators in all Australian states and territories. Beliefs about appropriate times and places for reptile releases were not reflected in practice for the majority of operators. Confidence about reptiles remaining at recipient sites was low regardless of how many years’ experience an operator had. Escaped captive native reptiles were encountered by most operators, and a quarter of operators were called out to exotic non-native snakes. Operators across all levels of experience indicated a need for changes within the industry, including increased training and professionalism, and more scientific studies on the outcomes of relocations to address concerns about the impacts that the industry has on the wildlife that it is trying to protect.
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Gallo-Cajiao E, Dolšak N, Prakash A, Mundkur T, Harris PG, Mitchell RB, Davidson N, Hansen B, Woodworth BK, Fuller RA, Price M, Petkov N, Mauerhofer V, Morrison TH, Watson JEM, Chowdhury SU, Zöckler C, Widerberg O, Yong DL, Klich D, Smagol V, Piccolo J & Biggs D (2023) Implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the governance of biodiversity conservation. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 4, 989019.
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Maintaining peace and conserving biodiversity hinge on an international system of cooperation codified in institutions, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brings recent progress to a crossroads. Against this backdrop, we address some implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the governance of biodiversity conservation both within and beyond Russia. The Russian invasion of Ukraine threatens the governance system for biodiversity conservation, as it pertains to Russia and beyond, due to three interacting factors: (i) isolation of Russia from the international system, (ii) halt and delay of international cooperation, and (iii) changes in international and domestic policy priorities. We recommend making the existing international system of governance for conserving biodiversity more resilient and adaptable, while aligning security agendas with biodiversity conservation goals.
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Chowdhury S, Zalucki MP, Hanson JO, Tiatragul S, Green D, Watson JEM & Fuller RA (2023) Three-quarters of insect species are insufficiently represented by protected areas. One Earth, 6, 1-8.
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Insects dominate the biosphere, yet insect populations are plummeting worldwide. Massive conservation efforts will be needed to reverse these declines. Protected areas (PAs) could act as a safeguard against extinction, but documented coverage of insect representation across the PA estate is limited. Here, we show that 76% of 89,151 insect species assessed globally do not meet minimum target levels of PA coverage. Nearly 1,900 species from 225 families do not overlap at all with PAs. Species with low PA coverage occur in North America, Eastern Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and Australasia. The Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework provides a guide to PA designations that require taking account of the needs of insects. Mapping important biodiversity areas must be upscaled to ensure nations capture insect diversity.
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Lin D-L, Ko J C-J, Amano T, Hsu C-T, Fuller RA, Maron M, Fan M-W, Pursner S, Wu T-Y, Wu S-H, Chen W-J, Bayraktarov E, Mundkur T, Lin R-S, Ding T-S, Lee Y-J & Lee P-F (2023) Taiwan’s Breeding Bird Survey reveals very few declining species. Ecological Indicators, 146, 109839.
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Multi-species indicators (MSIs) have been useful tools for reflecting the state of taxa and ecosystems at global, regional, and national levels. However, most indicators are from Europe and North America, and there are few from the world’s major tropical and subtropical biodiversity hotspots, often in large part because of insufficient data availability. We modelled the population trajectories of 107 regularly-occurring breeding bird species in Taiwan (100 native and seven introduced species) and developed MSIs for (i) forest, (ii) farmland, and (iii) introduced bird species based on the Taiwan Breeding Bird Survey dataset between 2011 and 2019. Individual population trajectories for 87 species did not show a significant change, those for 11 species grew significantly, and those for two species declined significantly. All MSIs show significant growth. Based on the phylogenetic generalised least squares (PGLS) results, the forest bird indicator increased somewhat more rapidly than the farmland bird indicator, perhaps reflecting very low rates of deforestation contrasting with more rapid land use change on farmlands in Taiwan. Some of the forest and farmland species, however, showed rapid declines, and most of these atypical decliners were common species or carnivores. Further, the PLGS results show that the introduced species indicator had more rapid growth than native species indicators, posing a potential risk for the integrity of native bird communities in the near future as well as compromising broader ecosystem intactness. Our study provides important information on bird population changes in subtropical Asia. The MSIs will be updated regularly and will be used to provide information to support conservation policies in Taiwan.
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Nicol S, Cros M-J, Peyrard N, Sabbadin R, Trépos R, Fuller RA & Woodworth BK (2023) FlywayNet: A hidden semi-Markov model for inferring the structure of migratory bird networks from count data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 14, 265-279.
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1. Every year, millions of birds migrate between breeding and nonbreeding habitat, but the relative numbers of animals moving between sites are difficult to observe directly.
2. Here we propose FlywayNet, a discrete network model based on observed count data, to determine the most likely migration links between regions using statistical modelling and efficient inference tools. Our approach advances on previous studies by accounting for noisy observations and flexible stopover durations by modelling using interacting hidden semi-Markov Models. In FlywayNet, individual birds sojourn in stopover nodes for a period of time before moving to other nodes with an unknown probability that we aim to estimate. Exact estimation using existing approaches is not possible, so we designed customised versions of the Monte Carlo expectation-maximisation and approximate Bayesian computation algorithms for our model. We compare the efficiency and quality of estimation of these approaches on synthetic data and an applied case study.
3. Our algorithms performed well on benchmark problems, with low absolute error and strong correlation between estimated and known parameters. On a case study using citizen science count data of the Far Eastern Curlew (Numenius madagascariensis), an endangered shorebird from the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, the ABC and MCEM algorithms generated contrasting recommendations due to a difference in optimisation criteria and noise in the data. For ABC, we recovered key features of population-level movements predicted by experts despite the challenges of noisy unstructured data.
4. Understanding connectivity places local conservation efforts and threat mitigation in the global context, yet it has proven difficult to rigorously quantify connectivity at the population level. Our approach provides a flexible framework to infer the structure of migratory networks in birds and other organisms.
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Chowdhury S, Jennions MD, Zalucki MP, Maron M, Watson JEM & Fuller RA (2023) Protected areas and the future of insect conservation. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 38, 85-95.
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Anthropogenic pressures are driving insect declines across the world. Although protected areas (PAs) play a prominent role in safeguarding many vertebrate species from human-induced threats, insects are not widely considered when designing PA systems or building strategies for PA management. We review the effectiveness of PAs for insect conservation and find substantial taxonomic and geographic gaps in knowledge. Most research focuses on the representation of species, and few studies assess threats to insects or the role that effective PA management can play in insect conservation. We propose a four-step research agenda to help ensure that insects are central in efforts to expand the global PA network under the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.