Don A. Driscoll

Effective and predictive biodiversity conservation strategies in human‐modified ecosystems require a sound understanding of community assembly. Three key mechanisms—homogeneous selection, neutral assembly and variable selection—have been postulated to influence assembly. These mechanisms often change spatiotemporally over disturbance gradients driven by niche availability. We evaluate how land cover interacts with season to alter assembly mechanisms and species richness of a bird community in a tropical forest‐agriculture mosaic. We focus on three land covers—small‐scale agriculture, community‐managed forests and a protected area—representing a forest disturbance gradient from most to least disturbed, across three seasons—post‐monsoon, winter and pre‐monsoon. We use functional dispersion as a metric combined with a null modelling approach to quantify changes in assembly mechanisms. We use multi‐species occupancy modelling to obtain probabilities of site use by species, corrected for imperfect detection, from which we estimate functional dispersion and species richness. Within the protected area, assembly mechanisms varied seasonally, shifting between variable selection, neutral assembly and homogeneous selection and had communities that were more functionally differentiated. In contrast, small‐scale agriculture and community‐managed forests witnessed only neutral assembly and homogeneous selection, associated with reduced niche availability. Habitat structure played an additional mediating role, with high bamboo, understorey and forest cover increasing functional differentiation. Species richness showed limited variation across land covers but composition changed. However, richness was higher in the protected area during winter. Species richness varied across seasons, being highest during the post‐monsoon season. High canopy and understorey cover increased species richness. Synthesis and applications . Our study provides novel insights into how tropical small‐scale agriculture subtly impacts seasonal assembly dynamics of forest bird communities leading to increased neutrality and homogeneous selection. We recommend that even for small‐scale farms in forest‐agriculture mosaics, high levels of canopy, bamboo, understorey and surrounding forest cover should be maintained. This could be facilitated by shifting away from non‐canopied crops and monocultures, and promoting agro‐forestry alternatives with native trees. Furthermore, we recommend that community forests should be managed to resemble contiguous stands of high‐integrity forests that can conserve assembly dynamics as found in protected areas.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is bringing ecological inference closer to decision‐making, producing detections, alerts, trends, and prioritisation outputs. Yet, consensus on how to interpret or act on these remains limited. We synthesise AI adoption in applied ecology and identify governance pressures as models become multimodal, transferable, edge‐deployable, and increasingly shaped by large language models. We highlight cross‐cutting risks where uptake outpaces oversight, including limits in explainability, validation, data sovereignty, environmental costs, cognitive off‐loading, and evidence integrity. Using the British Bat Survey as a representative case study, we show how AI can be operationalised through governance principles spanning benchmarking, transparency, auditability, data governance, equity, and sustainability. Policy implications : We propose a roadmap for responsible AI in applied ecology linking evaluation to decision context, clarifying responsibility, and ensuring AI strengthens rather than displaces accountable decision‐making. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the journal's blog .

Prolonged drought associated with climate change is a global threat to amphibians. Environmental watering could limit declines but may worsen the amphibian disease chytridiomycosis which thrives in wet conditions. We aimed to discover how environmental water and chytrid interact to influence the survival of the endangered frog Pseudophryne bibronii in southern Australia. We provided water to 20 rooftile refuges at each of five sites, while five other sites remained untreated. Frogs beneath rooftiles and natural refuges were swabbed for chytrid, measured, and individually identified monthly throughout the 2022 and 2023 breeding seasons. We found that adding water to rooftile shelters increased chytrid infection and reduced survival. Chytrid zoospore load was negatively related to recapture probability, and infected frogs had reduced survival and poorer body condition. Chytridiomycosis appears to cause both sublethal and lethal effects in P. bibronii. On the other hand, some P. bibronii appeared to clear themselves of chytrid, possibly related to locally unfavorable environmental conditions for chytrid, or adaptation to resist the disease. Chytrid infection probability was highest in the high rainfall 2022 year, later in the breeding season, increased with soil moisture and with soil pH in 1 year, but was not related to soil temperature. We conclude that creating moist refuges should be avoided in normal and high rainfall years because survival decreases and chytrid infection probability increases. However, it remains critical to repeat our methodology in this and other systems during drought, where increased chytridiomycosis caused by watering may be countered by avoiding desiccation‐related mortality.

Effective wildlife conservation relies on understanding how threats and associated management actions can interact to affect biodiversity. However, the impacts of concurrent disturbances on wildlife can be complex and difficult to predict. Altered fire regimes, invasive predators, and reduced rainfall are major threats to herpetofauna, but no research has investigated their interactive effects on any reptile or amphibian species to date. We undertook a natural experiment employing a control‐impact design in southern Australia to examine the combined and independent effects of prescribed fire, invasive red fox ( Vulpes vulpes ) management and low rainfall on reptile and amphibian richness and abundance. We found negative effects of prescribed fire on reptile species richness and the capture rates of four (out of five) herpetofauna species. Fox management had a positive effect on three skink species and a negative effect on the fourth. Our results demonstrate important interactions for some species. For example, low rainfall exacerbated the negative effects of prescribed fire for two species, while fox management mitigated the negative effects of prescribed fire and low rainfall for two species. This is the first study investigating the interactive effects of these three key threats on herpetofauna. Our discoveries demonstrate that investigating interactive effects can help explain why species have spatially and temporally variable responses to disturbances. Our results suggest that it may be beneficial to avoid prescribed fires and increase invasive predator management during climatically stressful periods.

Ecological disturbances are discrete events that alter or transform the physical, chemical, or biological characteristics of ecosystems. Disturbance can cause animal populations to decline and, according to the risk‐disturbance hypothesis and population collapse framework, these declines can be predicted by declines in animal body condition. However, no research has empirically examined the general relationship between body condition and abundance, nor their relationship in response to disturbance. We used a combined dataset representing 33 studies and > 42,000 observations of 75 species from Australia, New Zealand, Spain and the United States of America to test predictions relating to the relationship between reptile body condition and abundance. We first investigated the relationship at the site level and then used meta‐analytical models to test whether populations showed linked changes in abundance and body condition in response to disturbance. We further tested whether key environmental and species traits influenced this relationship and whether there was a time‐lagged effect of body condition responses on abundance. We found a positive relationship between mean reptile body condition and abundance at the site level. However, the relationship was largely lost when investigating population responses to disturbance. As such, our results provided no support for the risk‐disturbance hypothesis and limited support for the population collapse framework. Therefore, the impacts of disturbance on reptile body condition cannot be assumed to reflect or predict abundance responses. We provide a new conceptual framework that shows how disturbances can modify or uncouple the relationship between abundance and body condition by influencing underlying drivers, such as predation, competition and resource availability. Monitoring programs that infer population impacts based on changes in body condition should first confirm the relationship between these two variables in the relevant study system.

With biodiversity loss escalating globally, a step change is needed in our capacity to accurately monitor species populations across ecosystems. Robotic and autonomous systems (RAS) offer technological solutions that may substantially advance terrestrial biodiversity monitoring, but this potential is yet to be considered systematically. We used a modified Delphi technique to synthesize knowledge from 98 biodiversity experts and 31 RAS experts, who identified the major methodological barriers that currently hinder monitoring, and explored the opportunities and challenges that RAS offer in overcoming these barriers. Biodiversity experts identified four barrier categories: site access, species and individual identification, data handling and storage, and power and network availability. Robotics experts highlighted technologies that could overcome these barriers and identified the developments needed to facilitate RAS-based autonomous biodiversity monitoring. Some existing RAS could be optimized relatively easily to survey species but would require development to be suitable for monitoring of more ‘difficult’ taxa and robust enough to work under uncontrolled conditions within ecosystems. Other nascent technologies (for instance, new sensors and biodegradable robots) need accelerated research. Overall, it was felt that RAS could lead to major progress in monitoring of terrestrial biodiversity by supplementing rather than supplanting existing methods. Transdisciplinarity needs to be fostered between biodiversity and RAS experts so that future ideas and technologies can be codeveloped effectively.

Aim: To compare field‐based evidence of plant and animal responses to fire with remotely sensed signals of fire heterogeneity and post‐fire biomass recovery. Location: South‐eastern Australia; New South Wales. Time Period: 2019–2022. Major Taxa Studied: A total of 982 species of plants and animals, in eight taxonomic groups: amphibians, birds, fish, insects, mammals, molluscs, plants and reptiles. Methods: We collated 545,223 plant and animal response records from 47 field surveys of 4613 sites that focussed on areas burnt in 2019–2020. For each site, we calculated remotely sensed signals of fire heterogeneity and post‐fire biomass recovery, including the delayed recovery index. Meta‐regression analyses were conducted separately for species that declined after fire (negative effect sizes) and species that increased after fire (positive effect sizes) for each buffer size (250 m, 500 m, 1 km, 1.5 km, 2 km and 2.5 km radius). Results: We found that species exposed to homogenous high‐severity fire (i.e., low fire heterogeneity) were more likely to exhibit decreased abundance/occurrence or inhibited recovery. Areas with delayed recovery of biomass also had significant negative on‐ground responses, with lower abundance or occurrence in areas where biomass recovery was slower. Main Conclusions: The fire heterogeneity index and the delayed recovery index are suitable for inclusion in monitoring and reporting systems for tracking relative measures over time, particularly when field survey data is not available at the landscape scales required to support reporting and management decisions. Locations with remotely sensed signals of delayed recovery should be prioritised for protection against further disturbances that may interfere with the recovery process. Research attention must next focus on how cumulative fire heterogeneity patterns of successive fires affect the post‐fire recovery dynamics to further inform the application of remote sensing indicators as management tools for biodiversity conservation.

Camera traps are widely used in wildlife research and monitoring, so it is imperative to understand their strengths, limitations, and potential for increasing impact. We investigated a decade of use of wildlife cameras (2012–2022) with a case study on Australian terrestrial vertebrates using a multifaceted approach. We (i) synthesised information from a literature review; (ii) conducted an online questionnaire of 132 professionals; (iii) hosted an in‐person workshop of 28 leading experts representing academia, non‐governmental organisations (NGOs), and government; and (iv) mapped camera trap usage based on all sources. We predicted that the last decade would have shown: (i) exponentially increasing sampling effort, a continuation of camera usage trends up to 2012; (ii) analytics to have shifted from naive presence/absence and capture rates towards hierarchical modelling that accounts for imperfect detection, thereby improving the quality of outputs and inferences on occupancy, abundance, and density; and (iii) broader research scales in terms of multi‐species, multi‐site and multi‐year studies. However, the results showed that the sampling effort has reached a plateau, with publication rates increasing only modestly. Users reported reaching a saturation point in terms of images that could be processed by humans and time for complex analyses and academic writing. There were strong taxonomic and geographic biases towards medium–large mammals (>500 g) in forests along Australia's southeastern coastlines, reflecting proximity to major cities. Regarding analytical choices, bias‐prone indices still accounted for ~50% of outputs and this was consistent across user groups. Multi‐species, multi‐site and multiple‐year studies were rare, largely driven by hesitancy around collaboration and data sharing. There is no widely used repository for wildlife camera images and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is the dominant repository for sharing tabular occurrence records. However, the ALA is presence‐only and thus is unsuitable for creating detection histories with absences, inhibiting hierarchical modelling. Workshop discussions identified a pressing need for collaboration to enhance the efficiency, quality and scale of research and management outcomes, leading to the proposal of a Wildlife Observatory of Australia (WildObs). To encourage data standards and sharing, WildObs should (i) promote a metadata collection app; (ii) create a tagged image repository to facilitate artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) computer vision research in this space; (iii) address the image identification bottleneck via the use of AI/ML‐powered image‐processing platforms; (iv) create data commons for detection histories that are suitable for hierarchical modelling; and (v) provide capacity building and tools for hierarchical modelling. Our review highlights that while Australia's investments in monitoring biodiversity with cameras position it to be a global leader in this context, realising that potential requires a paradigm shift towards best practices for collecting, curating, sharing and analysing ‘Big Data’. Our findings and framework have broad applicability outside Australia to enhance camera usage to meet conservation and management objectives ranging from local to global scales. This review articulates a country/continental observatory approach that is also suitable for international collaborative wildlife research networks.