Weather effects on birds of different size are mediated by long-term climate and vegetation type in endangered temperate woodlands.

Species occurrence is influenced by a range of factors including habitat attributes, climate, weather, and human landscape modification. These drivers are likely to interact, but their effects are frequently quantified independently. Here, we report the results of a 13-year study of temperate woodland birds in south-eastern Australia to quantify how different-sized birds respond to the interacting effects of: (a) short-term weather (rainfall and temperature in the 12 months preceding our surveys), (b) long-term climate (average rainfall and maximum and minimum temperatures over the period 1970-2014), and (c) broad structural forms of vegetation (old-growth woodland, regrowth woodland, and restoration plantings). We uncovered significant interactions between bird body size, vegetation type, climate, and weather. High short-term rainfall was associated with decreased occurrence of large birds in old-growth and regrowth woodland, but not in restoration plantings. Conversely, small bird occurrence peaked in wet years, but this effect was most pronounced in locations with a history of high rainfall, and was actually reversed (peak occurrence in dry years) in restoration plantings in dry climates. The occurrence of small birds was depressed-and large birds elevated-in hot years, except in restoration plantings which supported few large birds under these circumstances. Our investigation suggests that different mechanisms may underpin contrasting responses of small and large birds to the interacting effects of climate, weather, and vegetation type. A diversity of vegetation cover is needed across a landscape to promote the occurrence of different-sized bird species in agriculture-dominated landscapes, particularly under variable weather conditions. Climate change is predicted to lead to widespread drying of our study region, and restoration plantings-especially currently climatically wet areas-may become critically important for conserving bird species, particularly small-bodied taxa.

Spatiotemporal effects of logging and fire on tall, wet temperate eucalypt forest birds.

Forests globally are subject to disturbances such as logging and fire that create complex temporal variation in spatial patterns of forest cover and stand age. However, investigations that quantify temporal changes in biodiversity in response to multiple forms of disturbance in space and time are relatively uncommon. Over a 10-yr period, we investigated the response of bird species to spatiotemporal changes in forest cover associated with logging and wildfire in the mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) forests of southeastern Australia. Specifically, we examined how bird occurrence changed with shifts in the proportion of area burned or logged in a 4.5 km radius surrounding our 88 long-term field survey sites, each measuring 1 ha in size. Overall species richness was greatest in older forest patches, but declined as the amount of fire around each site increased. At the individual species level, 31 of the 37 bird species we modeled exhibited a negative response to the amount of fire in the surrounding landscape, while one species responded positively to fire. Only nine species exhibited signs of recovery in the 6 yr of surveys following the fire. Five species were more likely to be detected as the proportion of logged forest surrounding a site increased, suggesting a possible "concentration effect" with displaced birds moving into unlogged areas following harvesting of adjacent areas. We also identified relationships between the coefficients of life history attributes and spatiotemporal changes in forest cover and stand age. Large-bodied birds and migratory species were associated with landscapes subject to large amounts of fire in 2009. There were associations between old growth stands and small-bodied bird species and species that were not insectivores. Our study shows that birds in mountain ash forests are strongly associated with old growth stands and exhibit complex, time-dependent, and species-specific responses to landscape disturbance. Despite logging and fire both being high-severity perturbations, no bird species exhibited similar responses to fire and logging in the landscape surrounding our sites. Thus, species responses to one kind of landscape-scale disturbance are not readily predictable based on an understanding of the responses to another kind of (albeit superficially similar) disturbance.

Predicting the time needed for environmental systematic reviews and systematic maps.

Systematic reviews (SRs) and systematic mapping aim to maximize transparency and comprehensiveness while minimizing subjectivity and bias. These are time-consuming and complex tasks, so SRs are considered resource intensive, but published estimates of systematic-review resource requirements are largely anecdotal. We analyzed all Collaboration for Environmental Evidence (CEE) SRs (n = 66) and maps (n = 20) published from 2012 to 2017 to estimate the average number of articles retained at each review stage. We also surveyed 33 experienced systematic reviewers to collate information on the rate at which those stages could be completed. In combination, these data showed that the average CEE SR takes an estimated 164 d (full-time equivalent) (SD 23), and the average CEE systematic map (SM) (excluding critical appraisal) takes 211 d (SD 53). While screening titles and abstracts is widely considered time-consuming, metadata extraction and critical appraisal took as long or longer to complete, especially for SMs. Given information about the planned methods and evidence base, we created a software tool that predicts time requirements of a SR or map with evidence-based defaults as a starting point. Our results shed light on the most time-consuming stages of the SR and mapping processes, will inform review planning, and can direct innovation to streamline processes. Future predictions of effort required to complete SRs and maps could be improved if authors provide more details on methods and results.

Pronóstico del Tiempo Necesario para las Revisiones Ambientales Sistemáticas y los Mapas Sistemáticos Resumen El mapeo sistemático y las revisiones sistemáticas buscan maximizar la transparencia y la exhaustividad mientras minimizan la subjetividad y la parcialidad. Estas son labores complejas que consumen tiempo, por lo que las revisiones sistemáticas se consideran como intensivas en recursos, pero en el caso de los requerimientos de los recursos para las revisiones sistemáticas las estimaciones publicadas son en su mayoría anecdóticas. Analizamos todas las revisiones sistemáticas (n = 66) y todos los mapas (n = 20) de la Colaboración para la Evidencia Ambiental (CEE, en inglés) publicados entre 2012 y 2017 para estimar el número promedio de artículos retenidos en cada etapa de revisión. También encuestamos a 33 revisores sistemáticos experimentado para cotejar la información sobre la tasa a la cual se podrían completar esas etapas. La combinación de estos datos mostró que la revisión sistemática promedio del CEE tarda un estimado de 164 días (equivalente de tiempo completo) (SD 23), y que el mapa sistemático promedio del CEE (excluyendo la evaluación crítica) tarda 211 días (SD 53). Se considera ampliamente que el proceso de selección de títulos y resúmenes consume mucho tiempo, pero la extracción de meta-datos y la evaluación crítica tarda la misma cantidad de tiempo, o más, para completarse, especialmente en el caso de los mapas sistemáticos. Con la información sobre los métodos planeados y la base de evidencias creamos una herramienta de software que predice los requerimientos de tiempo para un mapa sistemático o una revisión sistemática con defaults basados en evidencias como puntos de partida. Nuestros resultados traen a la luz las etapas de la revisión sistemática o del mapeo sistemático que más tiempo consumen, informarán sobre la planeación de revisiones, y pueden dirigir la innovación en los procesos simplificados. Los pronósticos futuros del esfuerzo requerido para completar los mapas y las revisiones sistémicos podría mejorarse si los autores proporcionar más detalles sobre los métodos y los resultados.

How practitioners integrate decision triggers with existing metrics in conservation monitoring.

Decision triggers are defined thresholds in the status of monitored variables that indicate when to undertake management, and avoid undesirable ecosystem change. Decision triggers are frequently recommended to conservation practitioners as a tool to facilitate evidence-based management practices, but there has been limited attention paid to how practitioners are integrating decision triggers into existing monitoring programs. We sought to understand whether conservation practitioners' use of decision triggers was influenced by the type of variables in their monitoring programs. We investigated this question using a practitioner-focused workshop involving a structured discussion and review of eight monitoring programs. Among our case studies, direct measures of biodiversity (e.g. native species) were more commonly monitored, but less likely to be linked to decision triggers (10% with triggers) than measures being used as surrogates (54% with triggers) for program objectives. This was because decision triggers were associated with management of threatening processes, which were often monitored as a surrogate for a biodiversity asset of interest. By contrast, direct measures of biodiversity were more commonly associated with informal decision processes that led to activities such as management reviews or external consultation. Workshop participants were in favor of including more formalized decision triggers in their programs, but were limited by incomplete ecological knowledge, lack of appropriately skilled staff, funding constraints, and/or uncertainty regarding intervention effectiveness. We recommend that practitioners consider including decision triggers for discussion activities (such as external consultation) in their programs as more than just early warning points for future interventions, particularly for direct measures. Decision triggers for discussions should be recognized as a critical feature of monitoring programs where information and operational limitations inhibit the use of decision triggers for interventions.

The difficulties of systematic reviews.

The need for robust evidence to support conservation actions has driven the adoption of systematic approaches to research synthesis in ecology. However, applying systematic review to complex or open questions remains challenging, and this task is becoming more difficult as the quantity of scientific literature increases. We drew on the science of linguistics for guidance as to why the process of identifying and sorting information during systematic review remains so labor intensive, and to provide potential solutions. Several linguistic properties of peer-reviewed corpora-including nonrandom selection of review topics, small-world properties of semantic networks, and spatiotemporal variation in word meaning-greatly increase the effort needed to complete the systematic review process. Conversely, the resolution of these semantic complexities is a common motivation for narrative reviews, but this process is rarely enacted with the rigor applied during linguistic analysis. Therefore, linguistics provides a unifying framework for understanding some key challenges of systematic review and highlights 2 useful directions for future research. First, in cases where semantic complexity generates barriers to synthesis, ecologists should consider drawing on existing methods-such as natural language processing or the construction of research thesauri and ontologies-that provide tools for mapping and resolving that complexity. These tools could help individual researchers classify research material in a more robust manner and provide valuable guidance for future researchers on that topic. Second, a linguistic perspective highlights that scientific writing is a rich resource worthy of detailed study, an observation that can sometimes be lost during the search for data during systematic review or meta-analysis. For example, mapping semantic networks can reveal redundancy and complementarity among scientific concepts, leading to new insights and research questions. Consequently, wider adoption of linguistic approaches may facilitate improved rigor and richness in research synthesis.

Exploiting the richest patch has a fitness pay-off for the migratory swift parrot.

1. Unlike philopatric migrants, the ecology of nomadic migrants is less well understood. This life-history strategy reflects responses to spatiotemporal variation in resource availability and the need to find resource rich patches to initiate breeding. The fitness consequences of movements between regions of patchily distributed resources can provide insight into ecology of all migrants and their responses to global change. 2. We link broad-scale data on spatiotemporal fluctuation in food availability to data on settlement patterns and fitness outcomes for a nomadic migrant, the endangered swift parrot Lathamus discolor. We test several predictions to determine whether facultative movements are adaptive for individual swift parrots in an environment where resources are patchily distributed over time and space. 3. Variation in the availability of swift parrot food resources across our study period was dramatic. As a consequence, swift parrots moved to breed wherever food was most abundant and did not resettle nesting regions in successive years when food availability declined. By moving, swift parrots exploited a variable food resource and reproduced successfully. 4. Exploiting the richest patches allowed swift parrots to maintain stable fitness outcomes between discrete breeding events at different locations. Unlike sedentary species that often produce few or lower quality offspring when food is scarce, nomadic migration buffered swift parrots against extreme environmental variation. 5. We provide the first detailed evidence that facultative movements and nomadic migration are adaptive for individuals in unpredictable environments. Our data support the widely held assumption that nomadic migration allows animals to escape resource limitation.

Text analysis tools for identification of emerging topics and research gaps in conservation science.

Keeping track of conceptual and methodological developments is a critical skill for research scientists, but this task is increasingly difficult due to the high rate of academic publication. As a crisis discipline, conservation science is particularly in need of tools that facilitate rapid yet insightful synthesis. We show how a common text-mining method (latent Dirichlet allocation, or topic modeling) and statistical tests familiar to ecologists (cluster analysis, regression, and network analysis) can be used to investigate trends and identify potential research gaps in the scientific literature. We tested these methods on the literature on ecological surrogates and indicators. Analysis of topic popularity within this corpus showed a strong emphasis on monitoring and management of fragmented ecosystems, while analysis of research gaps suggested a greater role for genetic surrogates and indicators. Our results show that automated text analysis methods need to be used with care, but can provide information that is complementary to that given by systematic reviews and meta-analyses, increasing scientists' capacity for research synthesis.

Improved management of farm dams increases vegetation cover, water quality, and macroinvertebrate biodiversity.

In many farming landscapes, aquatic features, such as wetlands, creeks, and dams, provide water for stock and irrigation, while also acting as habitat for a range of plants and animals. Indeed, some species threatened by land-use change may otherwise be considerably rarer-or even suffer extinction-in the absence of these habitats. Therefore, a critical issue for the maintenance of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes is the extent to which the management of aquatic systems can promote the integration of agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. We completed a cross-sectional study in southern New South Wales (southeastern Australia) to quantify the efficacy of two concurrently implemented management practices-partial revegetation and control of livestock grazing-aimed at enhancing the vegetation structure, biodiversity value, and water quality of farm dams. We found that excluding livestock for even short periods resulted in increased vegetation cover. Relative to unenhanced dams (such as those that remained unfenced), those that had been enhanced for several years were characterized by reduced levels of turbidity, nutrients, and fecal contamination. Enhanced dams also supported increased richness and abundance of macroinvertebrates. In contrast, unenhanced control dams tended to have high abundance of a few macroinvertebrate taxa. Notably, differences remained between the macroinvertebrate assemblages of enhanced dams and nearby "natural" waterbodies that we monitored as reference sites. While the biodiversity value of semilotic, natural waterbodies in the region cannot be replicated by artificial lentic systems, we consider the extensive system of farm dams in the region to represent a novel ecosystem that may nonetheless support some native macroinvertebrates. Our results show that management interventions such as fencing and grazing control can improve water quality in farm dams, improve vegetation structure around farm dams, and support greater abundance and diversity of aquatic macroinvertebrates.

Creating and curating a community of practice: introducing the evidence synthesis Hackathon and a special series in evidence synthesis technology.

Evidence synthesis is a vital part of evidence-informed decision-making, but high growth in the volume of research evidence over recent decades has made efficient evidence synthesis increasingly challenging. As the appreciation and need for timely and rigorous evidence synthesis continue to grow, so too will the need for tools and frameworks to conduct reviews of expanding evidence bases in an efficient and time-sensitive manner. Efforts to future-proof evidence synthesis through the development of new evidence synthesis technology (ESTech) have so far been isolated across interested individuals or groups, with no concerted effort to collaborate or build communities of practice in technology production. We established the evidence synthesis Hackathon to stimulate collaboration and the production of Free and Open Source Software and frameworks to support evidence synthesis. Here, we introduce a special series of papers on ESTech, and invite the readers of environmental evidence to submit manuscripts introducing and validating novel tools and frameworks. We hope this collection will help to consolidate ESTech development efforts and we encourage readers to join the ESTech revolution. In order to future-proof evidence synthesis against the evidence avalanche, we must support community enthusiasm for ESTech, reduce redundancy in tool design, collaborate and share capacity in tool production, and reduce inequalities in software accessibility.

revtools: An R package to support article screening for evidence synthesis.

The field of evidence synthesis is growing rapidly, with a corresponding increase in the number of software tools and workflows to support the construction of systematic reviews, systematic maps, and meta-analyses. Despite much progress, however, a number of problems remain, including slow integration of new statistical or methodological approaches into user-friendly software, low prevalence of open-source software, and poor integration among distinct software tools. These issues hinder the utility and transparency of new methods to the research community. Here, I present revtools, an R package to support article screening during evidence synthesis projects. It provides tools for the import and deduplication of bibliographic data, screening of articles by title or abstract, and visualization of article content using topic models. The software is entirely open-source and combines command-line scripting for experienced programmers with custom-built user interfaces for casual users, with further methods to support article screening to be added over time. revtools provides free access to novel methods in an open-source environment and represents a valuable step in expanding the capacity of R to support evidence synthesis projects.

Research Weaving: Visualizing the Future of Research Synthesis.

We propose a new framework for research synthesis of both evidence and influence, named research weaving. It summarizes and visualizes information content, history, and networks among a collection of documents on any given topic. Research weaving achieves this feat by combining the power of two methods: systematic mapping and bibliometrics. Systematic mapping provides a snapshot of the current state of knowledge, identifying areas needing more research attention and those ready for full synthesis. Bibliometrics enables researchers to see how pieces of evidence are connected, revealing the structure and development of a field. We explain how researchers can use some or all of these tools to gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the scientific literature.

Citizen Science Program Shows Urban Areas Have Lower Occurrence of Frog Species, but Not Accelerated Declines.

Understanding the influence of landscape change on animal populations is critical to inform biodiversity conservation efforts. A particularly important goal is to understand how urban density affects the persistence of animal populations through time, and how these impacts can be mediated by habitat provision; but data on this question are limited for some taxa. Here, we use data from a citizen science monitoring program to investigate the effect of urbanization on patterns of frog species richness and occurrence over 13 years. Sites surrounded by a high proportion of bare ground (a proxy for urbanization) had consistently lower frog occurrence, but we found no evidence that declines were restricted to urban areas. Instead, several frog species showed declines in rural wetlands with low-quality habitat. Our analysis shows that urban wetlands had low but stable species richness; but also that population trajectories are strongly influenced by vegetation provision in both the riparian zone and the wider landscape. Future increases in the extent of urban environments in our study area are likely to negatively impact populations of several frog species. However, existing urban areas are unlikely to lose further frog species in the medium term. We recommend that landscape planning and management focus on the conservation and restoration of rural wetlands to arrest current declines, and the revegetation of urban wetlands to facilitate the re-expansion of urban-sensitive species.

Visualization of species pairwise associations: a case study of surrogacy in bird assemblages.

Quantifying and visualizing species associations are important to many areas of ecology and conservation biology. Species networks are one way to analyze species associations, with a growing number of applications such as food webs, nesting webs, plant-animal mutualisms, and interlinked extinctions. We present a new method for assessing and visualizing patterns of co-occurrence of species. The method depicts interactions and associations in an analogous way with existing network diagrams for studying pollination and trophic interactions, but adds the assessment of sign, strength, and direction of the associations. This provides a distinct advantage over existing methods of quantifying and visualizing co-occurrence. We demonstrate the utility of our new approach by showing differences in associations among woodland bird species found in different habitats and by illustrating the way these can be interpreted in terms of underlying ecological mechanisms. Our new method is computationally feasible for large assemblages and provides readily interpretable effects with standard errors. It has wide applications for quantifying species associations within ecological communities, examining questions about particular species that occur with others, and how their associations can determine the structure and composition of communities.

Global meta-analysis reveals low consistency of biodiversity congruence relationships.

Knowledge of the number and distribution of species is fundamental to biodiversity conservation efforts, but this information is lacking for the majority of species on earth. Consequently, subsets of taxa are often used as proxies for biodiversity; but this assumes that different taxa display congruent distribution patterns. Here we use a global meta-analysis to show that studies of cross-taxon congruence rarely give consistent results. Instead, species richness congruence is highest at extreme spatial scales and close to the equator, while congruence in species composition is highest at large extents and grain sizes. Studies display highest variance in cross-taxon congruence when conducted in areas with dissimilar areal extents (for species richness) or latitudes (for species composition). These results undermine the assumption that a subset of taxa can be representative of biodiversity. Therefore, researchers whose goal is to prioritize locations or actions for conservation should use data from a range of taxa.

An empirical assessment and comparison of species-based and habitat-based surrogates: a case study of forest vertebrates and large old trees.

A holy grail of conservation is to find simple but reliable measures of environmental change to guide management. For example, particular species or particular habitat attributes are often used as proxies for the abundance or diversity of a subset of other taxa. However, the efficacy of such kinds of species-based surrogates and habitat-based surrogates is rarely assessed, nor are different kinds of surrogates compared in terms of their relative effectiveness. We use 30-year datasets on arboreal marsupials and vegetation structure to quantify the effectiveness of: (1) the abundance of a particular species of arboreal marsupial as a species-based surrogate for other arboreal marsupial taxa, (2) hollow-bearing tree abundance as a habitat-based surrogate for arboreal marsupial abundance, and (3) a combination of species- and habitat-based surrogates. We also quantify the robustness of species-based and habitat-based surrogates over time. We then use the same approach to model overall species richness of arboreal marsupials. We show that a species-based surrogate can appear to be a valid surrogate until a habitat-based surrogate is co-examined, after which the effectiveness of the former is lost. The addition of a species-based surrogate to a habitat-based surrogate made little difference in explaining arboreal marsupial abundance, but altered the co-occurrence relationship between species. Hence, there was limited value in simultaneously using a combination of kinds of surrogates. The habitat-based surrogate also generally performed significantly better and was easier and less costly to gather than the species-based surrogate. We found that over 30 years of study, the relationships which underpinned the habitat-based surrogate generally remained positive but variable over time. Our work highlights why it is important to compare the effectiveness of different broad classes of surrogates and identify situations when either species- or habitat-based surrogates are likely to be superior.

The trajectory of dispersal research in conservation biology. Systematic review.

Dispersal knowledge is essential for conservation management, and demand is growing. But are we accumulating dispersal knowledge at a pace that can meet the demand? To answer this question we tested for changes in dispersal data collection and use over time. Our systematic review of 655 conservation-related publications compared five topics: climate change, habitat restoration, population viability analysis, land planning (systematic conservation planning) and invasive species. We analysed temporal changes in the: (i) questions asked by dispersal-related research; (ii) methods used to study dispersal; (iii) the quality of dispersal data; (iv) extent that dispersal knowledge is lacking, and; (v) likely consequences of limited dispersal knowledge. Research questions have changed little over time; the same problems examined in the 1990s are still being addressed. The most common methods used to study dispersal were occupancy data, expert opinion and modelling, which often provided indirect, low quality information about dispersal. Although use of genetics for estimating dispersal has increased, new ecological and genetic methods for measuring dispersal are not yet widely adopted. Almost half of the papers identified knowledge gaps related to dispersal. Limited dispersal knowledge often made it impossible to discover ecological processes or compromised conservation outcomes. The quality of dispersal data used in climate change research has increased since the 1990s. In comparison, restoration ecology inadequately addresses large-scale process, whilst the gap between knowledge accumulation and growth in applications may be increasing in land planning. To overcome apparent stagnation in collection and use of dispersal knowledge, researchers need to: (i) improve the quality of available data using new approaches; (ii) understand the complementarities of different methods and; (iii) define the value of different kinds of dispersal information for supporting management decisions. Ambitious, multi-disciplinary research programs studying many species are critical for advancing dispersal research.