Publications | The Conservation Decisions Team

Feb 5

New analysis promises better weed management of the Lake Eyre Basin

This week Jennifer Firn is telling us about our Lake Eyre Basin threat prioritisation project outcome. Good job team (Press release)! Read more

Nov 1

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How good are we at detecting ecological change? It depends on where you look!

Nicol S., Roach J., Griffith B. (2013). Spatial heterogeneity in statistical power to detect changes in lake area in Alaskan National Wildlife Refuges. Landscape Ecology 28:507-517.

How well can we detect ecological change? It’s a good question— in the media we often hear about how the climate is changing, but how do we measure change, and does the amount of change that you detect depend on where and how long you look for it? It turns out that measuring change is pretty hard, and that it’s possible to get wildly different answers to the question “is the environment changing?” Read more

Oct 30

Novel method to predict habitat preference of a mammal species community on and along roads - Illustration with a Western Canadian highway

Identifying optimal road crossing locations for mammal species

Schuster R, Römer H, Germain RR. (2013) PeerJ 1:e189 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.189

In this paper we used a multi-scale approach to independently identify preferred road approach (up to 1km) and highway crossing areas, for a multi-species mammal community. This combined strategy could help improve road mitigation efforts, by prioritizing traditionally used areas of high potential for crossing and combine these with areas of preference for approaching the road. Read more

Oct 18

Predicting species distributions for conservation decisions

HOW CAN SPECIES DISTRIBUTION MODELS ACHIEVE BETTER CONSERVATION ACTIONS?

Species distribution models (SDMs) are increasingly proposed to support conservation decision making. However, evidence of SDMs supporting solutions for on-ground conservation problems is still scarce in the scientific literature. Read more

Oct 4

Migratory connectivity magnifies the consequences of sea-level rise

Tak‘s paper is out! Don’t miss the bottleneck index that we derived – a handy tool to predict the most important nodes.

Abstract: Sea-level rise (SLR) will greatly alter littoral ecosystems, causing habitat change and loss for coastal species. Habitat loss is widely used as a measurement of the risk of extinction, but because many coastal species are migratory, the impact of habitat loss will depend not only on its extent, but also on where it occurs. Here, we develop a novel graph-theoretic approach to measure the vulnerability of a migratory network to the impact of habitat loss from SLR based on population flow through the network. Read more