The contribution of policy,law, management,research, and advocacy failings to the recent extinctions of three Australian vertebrate species

Extinctions typically have ecological drivers, such as habitat loss. However, extinction events are also influenced by policy and management settings that may be antithetical to biodiversity conservation, inadequate to prevent extinction, insufficiently resourced, or poorly implemented. Three endemic Australian vertebrate species—the Christmas Island pipistrelle (Pipistrellus murrayi), Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola), and Christmas Island forest skink (Emoia nativitatis)—became extinct from 2009 to 2014. All 3 extinctions were predictable and probably preventable. We sought to identify the policy, management, research, and other shortcomings that contributed to their extinctions or failed to prevent them. These included a lack within national environmental legislation and policy of explicit commitment to the prevention of avoidable extinctions, lack of explicit accountability, inadequate resources for conservation (particularly for species not considered charismatic or not of high taxonomic distinctiveness), inadequate biosecurity, a slow and inadequate process for listing species as threatened, recovery planning that failed to consider the need for emergency response, inability of researchers to identify major threatening factors, lack of public engagement and involvement in conservation decisions, and limited advocacy. From these 3 cases, we recommend: environmental policy explicitly seeks to prevent extinction of any species and provides a clear chain of accountability and an explicit requirement for public inquiry following any extinction; implementation of a timely and comprehensive process for listing species as threatened and for recovery planning; reservation alone not be assumed sufficient to maintain species; enhancement of biosecurity measures; allocation of sufficient resources to undertake actions necessary to prevent extinction; monitoring be considered a pivotal component of the conservation response; research provides timely identification of factors responsible for decline and of the risk of extinction; effective dissemination of research results; advocacy by an informed public for the recovery of threatened species; and public involvement in governance of the recovery process. These recommendations should be applicable broadly to reduce the likelihood and incidence of extinctions.     

The costs of avoiding environmental impacts from shale‐gas surface infrastructure

Growing energy demand has increased the need to manage conflicts between energy production and the environment. As an example, shale‐gas extraction requires substantial surface infrastructure, which fragments habitats, erodes soils, degrades freshwater systems, and displaces rare species. Strategic planning of shale‐gas infrastructure can reduce trade‐offs between economic and environmental objectives, but the specific nature of these trade‐offs is not known. We estimated the cost of avoiding impacts from land‐use change on forests, wetlands, rare species, and streams from shale‐energy development within leaseholds. We created software for optimally siting shale‐gas surface infrastructure to minimize its environmental impacts at reasonable construction cost. We visually assessed sites before infrastructure optimization to test whether such inspection could be used to predict whether impacts could be avoided at the site. On average, up to 38% of aggregate environmental impacts of infrastructure could be avoided for 20% greater development costs by spatially optimizing infrastructure. However, we found trade‐offs between environmental impacts and costs among sites. In visual inspections, we often distinguished between sites that could be developed to avoid impacts at relatively low cost (29%) and those that could not (20%). Reductions in a metric of aggregate environmental impact could be largely attributed to potential displacement of rare species, sedimentation, and forest fragmentation. Planners and regulators can estimate and use heterogeneous trade‐offs among development sites to create industry‐wide improvements in environmental performance and do so at reasonable costs by, for example, leveraging low‐cost avoidance of impacts at some sites to offset others. This could require substantial effort, but the results and software we provide can facilitate the process.     

Wildlife and wildlife management in Tanzania

Tanzania, arguably mainland Africa's most important nation for conservation, is losing habitat and natural resources rapidly. Moving away from a charcoal energy base and developing sustainable finance mechanisms for natural forests are critical to slowing persistent deforestation. Addressing governance and capacity deficits, including law enforcement, technical skills, and funding, across parts of the wildlife sector are key to effective wildlife protection. These changes could occur in tandem with bringing new models of natural resource management into play that include capacity building, corporate payment for ecosystem services, empowering nongovernmental organizations in law enforcement, greater private‐sector involvement, and novel community conservation strategies. The future of Tanzania's wildlife looks uncertain—as epitomized by the current elephant crisis—unless the country confronts issues of governance, embraces innovation, and fosters greater collaboration with the international community.     

Rabbit biocontrol and landscape‐scale recovery of threatened desert mammals

Funding for species conservation is insufficient to meet the current challenges facing global biodiversity, yet many programs use expensive single‐species recovery actions and neglect broader management that addresses threatening processes. Arid Australia has the world's worst modern mammalian extinction record, largely attributable to competition from introduced herbivores, particularly European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) and predation by feral cats (Felis catus) and foxes (Vulpes vulpes). The biological control agent rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) was introduced to Australia in 1995 and resulted in dramatic, widespread rabbit suppression. We compared the area of occupancy and extent of occurrence of 4 extant species of small mammals before and after RHDV outbreak, relative to rainfall, sampling effort, and rabbit and predator populations. Despite low rainfall during the first 14 years after RHDV, 2 native rodents listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the dusky hopping‐mouse (Notomys fuscus) and plains mouse (Pseudomys australis), increased their extent of occurrence by 241–365%. A threatened marsupial micropredator, the crest‐tailed mulgara (Dasycercus cristicauda), underwent a 70‐fold increase in extent of occurrence and a 20‐fold increase in area of occupancy. Both bottom‐up and top‐down trophic effects were attributed to RHDV, namely decreased competition for food resources and declines in rabbit‐dependent predators. Based on these sustained increases, these 3 previously threatened species now qualify for threat‐category downgrading on the IUCN Red List. These recoveries are on a scale rarely documented in mammals and give impetus to programs aimed at targeted use of RHDV in Australia, rather than simply employing top‐down threat‐based management of arid ecosystems. Conservation programs that take big‐picture approaches to addressing threatening processes over large spatial scales should be prioritized to maximize return from scarce conservation funding. Further, these should be coupled with long‐term ecological monitoring, a critical tool in detecting and understanding complex ecosystem change.     

Place‐based and data‐rich citizen science as a precursor for conservation action

Environmental education strategies have customarily placed substantial focus on enhancing ecological knowledge and literacy with the hope that, upon discovering relevant facts and concepts, participants will be better equipped to process and dissect environmental issues and, therefore, make more informed decisions. The assumption is that informed citizens will become active citizens––enthusiastically lobbying for, and participating in, conservation‐oriented action. We surveyed and interviewed and used performance data from 432 participants in the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a scientifically rigorous citizen science program, to explore measurable change in and links between understanding and action. We found that participation in rigorous citizen science was associated with significant increases in participant knowledge and skills; a greater connection to place and, secondarily, to community; and an increasing awareness of the relative impact of anthropogenic activities on local ecosystems specifically through increasing scientific understanding of the ecosystem and factors affecting it. Our results suggest that a place‐based, data‐rich experience linked explicitly to local, regional, and global issues can lead to measurable change in individual and collective action, expressed in our case study principally through participation in citizen science and community action and communication of program results to personal acquaintances and elected officials. We propose the following tenets of conservation literacy based on emergent themes and the connections between them explicit in our data: place‐based learning creates personal meaning making; individual experience nested within collective (i.e., program‐wide) experience facilitates an understanding of the ecosystem process and function at local and regional scales; and science‐based meaning making creates informed concern (i.e., the ability to discern both natural and anthropogenic forcing), which allows individuals to develop a personalized prioritization schema and engage in conservation action.     

Design trade-offs in rights-based management of small-scale fisheries

Small-scale fisheries collectively have a large ecological footprint and are key sources of food security, especially in developing countries. Many of the data-intensive approaches to fishery management are infeasible in these fisheries, but a strategy that has emerged to overcome these challenges is the establishment of territorial user rights for fisheries (TURFs). In this approach, exclusive fishing zones are established for groups of stakeholders, which eliminates the race to fish with other groups. A key challenge, however, is setting the size of TURFs—too large and the number of stakeholders sharing them impedes collective action, and too small and the movement of target fish species in and out of the TURFs effectively removes the community's exclusive access. We assessed the size of 137 TURFs from across the globe relative to this design challenge by applying theoretical models that predict their performance. We estimated that roughly two-thirds of these TURFs were sized ideally to overcome the challenges posed by resource movement and fisher group size. However, for most of the remaining TURFs, all possible sizes were either too small to overcome the resource-movement challenge or too large to overcome the collective action challenge. Our results suggest these fisheries, which target mobile species in densely populated regions, may need additional interventions to be successful.     

Addressing identity-related barriers to collaboration for conservation through self-affirmation theory and moral foundations theory

The natural resource management literature documents many reasons for pursuing collaborative processes, offering useful insights on how to manage conflict and facilitate productive deliberation in complex multistakeholder collaborative efforts. Moral foundations theory and self-affirmation theory can further help collaborative efforts mitigate conflicts caused by identity threats and the identity-protective reasoning these threats provoke. Moral foundations theory suggests an approach to increase collaboration by minimizing triggering language and helping people appreciate opposing viewpoints. Self-affirmation theory suggests a practical intervention that could be used to increase collaboration by desensitizing people to identity threats and reducing defensiveness. Taken together, these theories can contribute substantially to the understanding and practice of collaboration and conflict management for conservation.     

Effects of sublethal application of Deepwater Horizon oil to bird eggs on embryonic heart and metabolic rate

Following large crude oil spills, oil from feathers of brooding birds and oiled nesting material can transfer to eggs, resulting in reduced embryonic viability for heavily oiled eggs. Eggs may also be subjected to trace or light oiling, but functional teratogenic effects from sublethal crude oil exposure have not been examined. We assessed whether sublethal application of weathered Deepwater Horizon crude oil to the eggshell surface alters heart rate and metabolic rate in Zebra Finch (Taeniopygia guttata) embryos. We first determined sublethal applications with a dosing experiment. Embryo viability for eggs exposed to 5 μL or more of crude oil decreased significantly. We conducted a second experiment to measure heart rate and metabolic rate (CO₂ production) 5 and 9 d after 1 sublethal application of crude oil to eggshells on day 3 of incubation. One application of 1.0 or 2.5 µL of crude oil reduced embryonic heart rate and metabolic rate on day 12 of incubation. Using unfertilized eggs, we measured the transfer of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from the eggshell surface to egg contents 9 d after a single application of sublethal crude oil. Our results suggest avian eggs externally exposed to small amounts of crude oil may exhibit protracted embryonic development and impaired postnatal cardiac performance.     

Michael Soulé (1936–2020) on spirituality,ethics, and conservation biology

Michael Soulé is best known for his scientific contributions and central role in founding the Society for Conservation Biology and its flagship journal. Less well known are his childhood experiences, his affinity for Zen Buddhism and Arne Naess’ deep ecology philosophy, and his contributions as an environmental activist to efforts to protect biodiversity and rewild ecosystems. Also less well known is the extent to which he was an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar, struggling to understand what promotes and hinders proenvironmental behaviors. In this regard, his life and that of many other conservation scientists provide important clues, but no easy answers. By attempting to integrate the humanities, with its quest for a meaningful and fulfilling human existence, with naturalistic nature spirituality and ecocentric values, as well as the social and natural sciences, Soulé sought to solve the riddle as to why human beings seemed unable to understand, slow, and halt negative anthropogenic environmental change. He thus modeled what interdisciplinary environmental studies is at its best. Those advocating the conservation of biological diversity have much to learn from Michael Soulé, not only from his scientific findings but also from his way of seeing, the questions he asked, and his love of the living world.     

Conserving spawning stocks through harvest slot limits and no-take protected areas

The key to the conservation of harvested species is the maintenance of reproductive success. Yet for many marine species large, old, individuals are targeted despite their disproportionate contribution to reproduction. We hypothesized that a combination of no-take marine protected areas (MPAs) and harvest slot limits (maximum and minimum size limits) would result in the conservation of large spawning individuals under heavy harvest. We tested this approach under different harvest intensities with a 2-sex, stage-structured metapopulation model for the Caribbean spiny lobster (Panulirus argus). P. argus is intensively harvested in the Caribbean, and in many localities large, mature individuals no longer exist. No-take MPAs and harvest slot limits combined, rebuilt and maintained large mature individuals even under high harvest pressure. The most conservative model (a 30% MPA and harvest slot limit of 75–105 mm) increased spawner abundance by 5.53E¹² compared with the fishing status quo at the end of 30 years. Spawning stock abundance also increased by 2.76–9.56E¹² individuals at a high harvest intensity over 30 years with MPAs alone. Our results demonstrate the potential of MPAs and harvest slot limits for the conservation of large breeding individuals in some marine and freshwater environments. Decisions on which management strategy best suits a fishery, however, requires balancing what is ecologically desirable with what is economically and socially feasible.