Search

Summary: This paper provides a critical analysis of the development and current outcomes of Australia's first endorsed strategic assessment under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, namely, the Melbourne Strategic Assessment. It covers progress towards protection of a number of Nationally Significant Species and Ecological Communities – most notably, the native grassland communities immediately adjacent to Melbourne's Urban Growth Boundary. The Commonwealth approval to protect biodiversity and allow urban development was made in 2010 and it aimed to achieve its outcomes by 2020. These outcomes included providing new land for homes, for new transport corridors, and for conservation of biodiversity. Natural Temperate Grassland (4,667 ha), Grassy Eucalypt Woodland (709 ha) and seven other Matters of National Environmental Significance will be impacted. Mitigation for this is establishment of 15,000 ha of grassland reserves, 1,200 ha of grassy woodland reserves, over 4,000 ha of other land zoned for conservation and 300 ha of wetland restoration. We conclude that the Melbourne Strategic Assessment has been a success in terms of the elegance and comprehensiveness of the approach, in cooperation between the levels of government, in the economic benefits, and in some aspects of social engagement of the agreement. However, the achievement of environmental outcomes must be currently considered a failure due to poor implementation. This failure includes not meeting the agreed 10 year deadline for land acquisition and management, poor monitoring and protection of set‐aside areas, and in reporting. We offer suggestions for how these current shortcomings could be overcome. These align well with the recommendations of the review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (The independent statutory review of the Act in 2020) and include the establishment of the proposed Office of Compliance and Enforcement, the adoption of National Environmental Standards and the reforms regarding the role of Indigenous Australians in strategic assessments. If these were adopted, we conclude that the strategic assessment approach should be more widely used because of the more holistic approach and efficiencies that it envisages compared with site by site approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the contribution of community members to functional diversity is a key question of conservation ecology, its measurement and interpretation are rather problematic. In this paper, we suggest a novel method for decomposing functional diversity. To do this we consider functional units (i.e. species or a group of species with identical traits) as the functional building blocks of communities. Then we propose the use of a recently developed measure of functional diversity (called modified functional attribute diversity or MFAD) and suggest additive decomposition of MFAD into functional values contributed by the functional units. We point out that functional values are related to changes in MFAD if the functional unit is removed from the community. This property of decomposition allows the quantification of the contribution of community members to functional diversity. By studying artificial and actual communities we compare the performance of our new method with other recently developed contribution measures, which are based on dendrograms and ordinations. Both theoretical considerations and analyses of artificial and actual data sets suggest that the proposed method of calculating functional values expresses more explicitly the contribution of community members to functional diversity and hereby can be used as a simple, yet efficient method for searching for functional keystones in ecological communities or for quantifying the contribution of community members to functional diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dispersal is universally considered important for biodiversity conservation. However, the significance of long- as opposed to short-distance dispersal is insufficiently recognized in the conservation context. Long-distance dispersal (LDD) events, although typically rare, are crucial to population spread and to maintenance of genetic connectivity. The main threats to global biodiversity involve excessive LDD of elements alien to ecosystems and insufficient dispersal of native species, for example, because of habitat fragmentation. In this paper, we attempt to bridge the gap in the treatment of LDD by reviewing the conservation issues for which LDD is most important. We then demonstrate how taking LDD into consideration can improve conservation management decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue ofDiversity and Distributionspresents six papers that contribute to the assembly of a general research agenda for studying long-distance dispersal (LDD) across a variety of taxonomic groups (e.g. birds, fish, aquatic invertebrates and plants), ecosystems (e.g. terrestrial and marine ecosystems, wetlands and grasslands) and thematic fields (e.g. biological transport, marine biology, biogeochemistry and biodiversity conservation). This editorial emphasizes the need to develop a network integrating different research approaches (‘yellow brick roads’) to address the great challenge (‘finding the end of the rainbow’) of quantifying, understanding and predicting LDD and its implications. I review the key avenues for future research suggested in the special issue contributions, and stress the critical importance of properly considering the spatial and temporal scales relevant to the process and system of interests. I propose combining absolute and proportional definitions of LDD as a default practice in any investigation of LDD processes. When LDD is defined primarily by an absolute critical distance that characterizes key feature(s) of the system of interest, a quantitative assessment of the proportion of dispersal events expected to move beyond this critical threshold distance should also be provided. When LDD is defined primarily by a certain small fraction of dispersal events that travel longer than all others, an estimate of the absolute distance associated with this high percentile at the tail of the dispersal curve should also be added. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly the importance of Indigenous participation is acknowledged as central to effective biodiversity conservation. Traditional management emphasizes the importance of a holistic, integrated approach to safeguard species and ecological communities of cultural significance. This is discordant with many instruments for biodiversity conservation. Indigenous Australians have consistently lobbied for domestic laws to be amended to establish comanagement as the preferred approach to managing significant species and ecological communities – an approach that aligns with international obligations such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We describe amendments to Australia's biodiversity legislation and the use of biocultural indicators that would support Traditional management of Culturally Significant Entities (species and ecological communities), and in turn, assist Australia to effectively conserve biodiversity and meet international obligations. The ongoing challenge will be in empowering Indigenous peoples and their governance structures to implement enduring change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humid tropical alpine environments are crucial ecosystems that sustain biodiversity, biological processes, carbon storage and surface water provision. They are identified as one of the terrestrial ecosystems most vulnerable to global environmental change. Despite their vulnerability, and the importance for regional biodiversity conservation and socio-economic development, they are among the least studied and described ecosystems in the world. This paper reviews the state of knowledge about tropical alpine environments, and provides an integrated assessment of the potential threats of global climate change on the major ecosystem processes. Humid tropical alpine regions occur between the upper forest line and the perennial snow border in the upper regions of the Andes, the Afroalpine belt and Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Climate change will displace ecosystem boundaries and strongly reduce the total area of tropical alpine regions. Displacement and increased isolation of the remaining patches will induce species extinction and biodiversity loss. Drier and warmer soil conditions will cause a faster organic carbon turnover, decreasing the below-ground organic carbon storage. Since most of the organic carbon is currently stored in the soils, it is unlikely that an increase in above-ground biomass will be able to offset soil carbon loss at an ecosystem level. Therefore a net release of carbon to the atmosphere is expected. Changes in precipitation patterns, increased evapotranspiration and alterations of the soil properties will have a major impact on water supply. Many regions are in danger of a significantly reduced or less reliable stream flow. The magnitude and even the trend of most of these effects depend strongly on local climatic, hydrological and ecological conditions. The extreme spatial gradients in these conditions put the sustainability of ecosystem management at risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provisioning of sustaining goods and services that we obtain from natural ecosystems is a strong economic justification for the conservation of biological diversity. Understanding the relationship between these goods and services and changes in the size, arrangement, and quality of natural habitats is a fundamental challenge of natural resource management. In this paper, we describe a new approach to assessing the implications of habitat loss for loss of ecosystem services by examining how the provision of different ecosystem services is dominated by species from different trophic levels. We then develop a mathematical model that illustrates how declines in habitat quality and quantity lead to sequential losses of trophic diversity. The model suggests that declines in the provisioning of services will initially be slow but will then accelerate as species from higher trophic levels are lost at faster rates. Comparison of these patterns with empirical examples of ecosystem collapse (and assembly) suggest similar patterns occur in natural systems impacted by anthropogenic change. In general, ecosystem goods and services provided by species in the upper trophic levels will be lost before those provided by species lower in the food chain. The decrease in terrestrial food chain length predicted by the model parallels that observed in the oceans following overexploitation. The large area requirements of higher trophic levels make them as susceptible to extinction as they are in marine systems where they are systematically exploited. Whereas the traditional species area curve suggests that 50% of species are driven extinct by an order-of-magnitude decline in habitat abundance, this magnitude of loss may represent the loss of an entire trophic level and all the ecosystem services performed by the species on this trophic level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's first national assessment of spatial priorities for biodiversity conservation, released in 2005, aimed to identify conservation priority areas for mainstreaming into all sectors at national and provincial scales. This National Spatial Biodiversity Assessment (NSBA) was based on a planning for implementation approach in order to deliver defensible products useful to decision-makers. The NSBA aimed to produce a map of broad-scale priority areas for future finer-scale assessment and conservation action. This map summarized information on species, ecosystems, ecological processes, and the pressures they face from human activities. Owing to the complexity of the priority area map, two additional user-friendly products — maps of ecosystem status and protection levels — were developed. These products represented the habitat loss and protected area coverage of South Africa's ecosystems relative to their conservation targets. A year after release, we reflect on the NSBA process, products and uptake by implementing agencies (with a specific focus on the terrestrial biodiversity assessment) in order to contribute to the growing body of documented best practice in conservation planning. The ecosystem status product has been widely used at national and provincial scales due in large to its clear and compelling message. The protection level and overall priority map have also witnessed uptake, the former in guiding the expansion of protected areas and the latter as an integrated map of national biodiversity status. The strong collaboration of local planners and implementers with in-depth experience of biodiversity assessment, using a systematic approach and focusing on communicating a few high level messages, appears to have contributed to the initial, successful uptake of the NSBA. We conclude with a call to address data and monitoring shortcomings before the next NSBA in 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a potential mechanism to explain how biodiversity loss may influence variability in ecosystem functioning, we examine the hypothesis that biodiversity loss lowers similarity in species composition among local communities and that this decreased similarity in turn lowers ecosystem reliability. Ecosystem reliability refers to the probability that a system will provide a consistent level of performance over a given unit of time. This hypothesis is compared with other hypotheses that make similar predictions, including the sampling effect, insurance, and resource use complementarity hypotheses. We provide evidence for the similarity hypothesis through a reanalysis of a recent experiment and show that a key assumption of the hypothesis may be robust through computer simulations. We also address problems and possible solutions regarding how to separately test the similarity and other hypotheses in biodiversity experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents several studies on the integration of ecosystems and production. Model evaluation of two regulatory strategies considered to increase egg production of fishes; Importance of remnants on farms for invertebrate biodiversity; Management system in the viticulture industry.