Wildlife-Vehicle Collisions in Tasmania: Tourists' Attitudes and Behaviour.

The surge in wildlife-vehicle collision research has not yet translated into a substantial decrease in animal fatalities. In line with the prevailing view, we suspect that drivers' behaviour may be the most crucial element. We address a research gap in drivers' attitudes towards and behaviour in response to wildlife-vehicle collisions from a tourist perspective. We designed a questionnaire to examine tourists' attitudes and behaviour in relation to wildlife-vehicle collisions while driving in Tasmania. We found that the respondents' sociodemographic attributes had minimal effect on their practical responses to roadkill. Tourists consider wildlife-vehicle collisions a serious problem for both biodiversity loss and animal welfare reasons, and their willingness to change their behaviour was high. However, many respondents did not stop to check for surviving pouch young. This inaction resulted either from overlooking the importance of pouch checking or a lack of knowledge on what action needed to be taken. There may also be a lack of understanding that roadkill left on the road leads to secondary roadkill incidents. Even though tourist behaviour does not automatically represent residents' behaviour, these findings will help to improve and tailor educational approaches to rectify the driver awareness/behaviour gap for both tourists and residents.

Landowner Perceptions of Payments for Nature Conservation on Private Land.

Private land conservation (PLC) programs often provide financial incentives to motivate and enable landowners to engage in conservation. However, few studies have explored the psychological and management impacts of these incentives. We interviewed 50 landowners in Tasmania, Australia who were engaged in incentivised or nonincentivised PLC programs. Landowners who received incentives were paid to either protect private land through creating a conservation covenant (a legal deed restricting land uses) or engage in a specific stewardship activity (e.g., planting trees). Most landowners who received payments to create covenants stated that they would not have done so without the payment. However, landowners, including those who have purchased or inherited covenanted properties, also indicated that neither these payments, nor the conservation covenant made any significant impact on how they managed the land. Covenant incentives did not improve attitudes towards conservation or conservationists. In contrast, most landowners receiving stewardship payments reported that these payments enabled the conservation actions they valued, helped build relationships and promoted favorable attitudes towards conservation. Contextual factors that influenced the impact of financial incentives on conservation action included the quality of relationship between landowners and stewardship officers, availability of private funds for conservation, and multigenerational aspirations. Our research identifies some of the intended and unintended impacts of financial incentives and describes how a fuller understanding of the motivations, identities, and aspirations of landowners may lead to the design of more socially resilient and ecologically effective PLC programs.

Conventional intensive logging promotes loss of organic carbon from the mineral soil.

There are few data, but diametrically opposed opinions, about the impacts of forest logging on soil organic carbon (SOC). Reviews and research articles conclude either that there is no effect, or show contradictory effects. Given that SOC is a substantial store of potential greenhouse gasses and forest logging and harvesting is routine, resolution is important. We review forest logging SOC studies and provide an overarching conceptual explanation for their findings. The literature can be separated into short-term empirical studies, longer-term empirical studies and long-term modelling. All modelling that includes major aboveground and belowground biomass pools shows a long-term (i.e. ≥300 years) decrease in SOC when a primary forest is logged and then subjected to harvesting cycles. The empirical longer-term studies indicate likewise. With successive harvests the net emission accumulates but is only statistically perceptible after centuries. Short-term SOC flux varies around zero. The long-term drop in SOC in the mineral soil is driven by the biomass drop from the primary forest level but takes time to adjust to the new temporal average biomass. We show agreement between secondary forest SOC stocks derived purely from biomass information and stocks derived from complex forest harvest modelling. Thus, conclusions that conventional harvests do not deplete SOC in the mineral soil have been a function of their short time frames. Forest managers, climate change modellers and environmental policymakers need to assume a long-term net transfer of SOC from the mineral soil to the atmosphere when primary forests are logged and then undergo harvest cycles. However, from a greenhouse accounting perspective, forest SOC is not the entire story. Forest wood products that ultimately reach landfill, and some portion of which produces some soil-like material there rather than in the forest, could possibly help attenuate the forest SOC emission by adding to a carbon pool in landfill.

Shifts in composition of monthly invertebrate assemblages in Moorland differed between lowland and montane locations but not fire-ages.

Understanding seasonal changes in invertebrate populations is important for understanding ecosystem processes and for conservation of invertebrate communities. Few studies have investigated variation in seasonal responses of multiorder and multispecies invertebrate assemblages. To determine whether temporal patterns in invertebrate assemblages and taxa vary between locations and vegetation age since burning, patterns of invertebrate occurrence were investigated monthly for 12 mo in cool temperate buttongrass moorlands at two locations (lowland and montane) containing paired plots with different fire history (young and old regrowth). For both locations and fire-ages, invertebrate taxon richness and abundance were generally higher during the warmer months than during the winter months. At the lowland location, foliage dwelling invertebrates were caught in greater numbers during winter than during summer owing to large numbers of Collembola. Each season had a distinct invertebrate assemblage. The invertebrate assemblages did not differ between young and old regrowth. The shifts in composition of monthly invertebrate assemblages between winter and summer differed between locations with assemblages in cooler months more dissimilar from warmer months at the montane location than the lowland location. Most taxa common to both locations had similar patterns of monthly occurrence but some taxa showed markedly different patterns. Mid- to late summer is the optimum time to conduct short-term surveys in buttongrass moorland to maximize species richness and abundance but short-term studies will miss significant components of the invertebrate community.