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Vegetation clearing has been implicated as a major contributor to biodiversity loss. It therefore stands to reason that developers should face a regulatory requirement to assess potential impacts and to avoid, mitigate and compensate for loss of vegetation wherever proposed infrastructure developments impact on vegetation considered to be habitat for threatened species. Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) rely on accurate information to describe the distributions of threatened species within the footprint of proposed infrastructure developments, which is critical to ensuring appropriate mitigation of potentially deleterious impacts on these populations. EIA survey guidelines seek to determine species' presence accurately, while acknowledging the limits imposed by time and budget constraints. As such, the EIA guidelines may recommend: (1) stratifying the landscape based on previous knowledge of habitat variables relevant to a species; and (2) targeting survey effort to strata with high probability of occupancy. Here, we use koala Phascolarctos cinereus surveys as a case study to explore the extent to which application of EIA guidelines result in accurate occupancy estimates. We compared the presence/absence distribution across one landscape survey and three EIA surveys, and found that koala occupancy was not well predicted by koala habitat criteria widely used to inform sampling design. In the context of EIA, we provide an example of how targeting survey effort to strata with high probability of occupancy risks misrepresenting true occurrence patterns. A general issue with survey designs that rely on previous knowledge is that they self‐reinforce erroneous assumptions. Our findings stand as a warning that EIA might neither quantify the impact of proposed infrastructure developments adequately, nor inform the ensuing mitigation measures. Threatened species' protection in the face of infrastructure development will require new approaches to EIAs to ensure that providers are enabled to undertake comprehensive environmental surveys capable of detecting priority species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2010 Southern Hemisphere (SH) influenza season, there was an unexpected increase in the number of febrile reactions reported in the paediatric population in Australia shortly after vaccination with the CSL 2010 trivalent influenza vaccine (TIV) compared to previous seasons. A series of scientific investigations were initiated to identify the root cause of these adverse events, including in vitro cytokine/chemokine assays following stimulation of adult and paediatric whole blood, as well as mammalian cell lines and primary cells, profiling of molecular signatures using microarrays, and in vivo studies in rabbits, ferrets, new born rats and rhesus non-human primates (NHPs). Various TIVs (approved commercial vaccines as well as re-engineered TIVs) and their individual monovalent pool harvest (MPH) components were examined in these assays and in animal models. Although the scientific investigations are ongoing, the current working hypothesis is that the increase in febrile adverse events reported in Australia after vaccination with the CSL 2010 SH TIV may be due to a combination of both the introduction of three entirely new strains in the CSL 2010 SH TIV, and differences in the manufacturing processes used to manufacture CSL TIVs compared to other licensed TIVs on the market. Identification of the causal component(s) may result in the identification of surrogate assays that can assist in the formulation of TIVs to minimise the future incidence of febrile reactions in the paediatric population., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)