More bang for your carbon buck: carbon, biodiversity and water balance consequences of whole catchment carbon farming (ARC)
Collaborators:
Ross Thompson, Jason Beringer, Tim Cavagnaro, Patrick Baker, Mark Eigenraam [DSE], Leon Metzeling [EPA Victoria], Jim Thomson (PDF), Shaun Cunningham (PDF)
Farming carbon though tree plantings on pasture land is becoming increasingly common to address the effects of climate change. This activity is likely to produce dramatic changes in Australia's rural landscapes, but we have little knowledge of likely effects on crucial ecosystem services and attributes such as stream water yields and biodiversity. This project will investigate the relationship between tree cover, carbon uptake, water yield and biodiversity. The outcomes will allow government agencies, landowners and carbon farming groups to better evaluate the effects of different landscape planning options and contribute to effective long‑term planning for multiple goals.
Change ecology – gaining broad scale, timely biodiversity knowledge in a time of uncertainty (ARC)
Collaborators:
Erica Fleishman (U California, Santa Barbara), Jim Thomson (PDF), Shaun Cunningham (PDF), Hania Lada (PDF)
Australians are confronted daily with the consequences of changes wrought by human over‑exploitation of natural resources. Our capacity to track and respond to change is very limited and slow. Thus, rapid deterioration of ecologically important aspects is detected late and is not reflective of the general state because knowledge is derived from small‑scale measurements that are difficult to generalize. We will build a capacity for providing large‑scale knowledge of vegetation condition and flow‑on effects on biodiversity, which also will allow us to make informed assessments of the ecological consequences of some existing (climate change, drying) and imminent (biofuel plantings) drivers of change.
Pelagic Organism Decline (NCEAS)
Collaborators:
Jim Thomson, Wim Kimmerer, Frederick Feyrer, Ken Newman, Andy Sih, Bill Bennett, Larry Brown, Erica Fleishman, Steven Culberson, Gonzalo Castillo, Howard Townsend, Marissa Bauer, Mark Maunder, John Melack, Dennis Murphy
In late 2004, scientists noted that abundance indices of several pelagic fishes in the upper San Francisco Estuary (delta smelt, age-0 striped bass, longfin smelt, and threadfin shad) had remained unusually low since 2001. Delta smelt is an endemic species listed as threatened under both the California and U.S. Endangered Species Acts. Protection of delta smelt often determines water management actions in the estuary, which supplies drinking water to more than 22 million people and supports a multi-billion dollar agricultural industry. The abundance of longfin smelt, another native species, has a strong positive relationship to freshwater outflow. Striped bass and threadfin shad are both introduced species that contribute substantially to the total biomass of pelagic fishes in the ecosystem and support valuable recreational fisheries. NCEAS and the Interagency Ecological Program are collaborating to convene several working groups on issues related to decline of pelagic organisms. We hope not only to gain a better understanding of the specific causes and mechanisms behind the organism declines in the San Francisco Estuary, but to place these declines in the broader context of estuarine degradation, organism declines, and approaches to solving these problems in other geographic regions. Among other goals, we seek to examine simultaneously the effects of multiple potential drivers on one or more fishes. Further, we aim to investigate whether fishes differ in their response to given drivers. We also wish to explore the ability of Bayesian analysis, path analysis, or other modeling approaches to draw inference regarding ecological relationships among pelagic fishes, human actions, and inherent variability in the estuarine system.
Aquatic biodiversity: consequences of massive modification of agricultural landscapes (ARC)
Collaborators:
Sam Lake, Andrea Taylor, Hania Lada (PDF), Jim Thomson (PDF)
We will examine how land-clearing and land-use change affect aquatic biota at whole-landscape scales, about which virtually nothing is known. We compare landscapes in the one biogeographic region (box-ironbark region of north-central Victoria) having different degrees of vegetation clearance and change in distributions, types and permanence of aquatic habitats. We use both ecological and population genetic tools to quantify effects on ecosystems and dispersal of taxa. We compare these results with existing studies-in these same landscapes-of impacts on terrestrial animals to provide a much more synthetic picture of effects of land-use change on biodiversity.
Towards sustainable floodplain communities: Assessing River Red Gum health (ARC)
Collaborators:
Jenny Read, Patrick Baker, Matt White (DSE), Shaun Cunningham (PDF), Gillis Horner (PhD)
Floodplain vegetation in Australia has suffered severe degradation from river regulation but there is limited understanding of the functioning, responses and requirements of the ecosystem’s most critical species, the River Red Gum. We will address three knowledge gaps needed for effective management of floodplain river red gums by assessing current and past health, determining stressors affecting health and by building a model for predicting future health based on projected trends. Outcomes from this study will help land managers to prioritise environmental flow allocations based on the requirements for sustaining future river red gum populations.
The importance of dispersal in maintaining biodiversity of aquatic plants in landscapes (ARC)
Collaborators:
Ross Thompson, Elisa Raulings (PDF), Kay Morris (PDF)
Fragmentation of aquatic ecosystems within agricultural landscapes has disrupted the dispersal pathways of aquatic plants. Dispersal plays a critical role in maintaining species richness and genetic diversity of aquatic plants, but is poorly understood. The project will: (1) establish the relative importance of dispersal by wind, water and waterbirds, (2) determine how each of these pathways contributes to plant communities across the landscape and (3) identify optimal environmental flows for plant dispersal and establishment. This information will result in the development of appropriate landscape-scape management and environmental water allocations to preserve plant diversity in Australia’s aquatic habitats.
Biodiversity modelling (Nevada Biodiversity Initiative)
Collaborators:
Erica Fleishman (Stanford Univ.), Jim Thomson (PDF)
This is an on-going collaboration in which we explore spatial patterns of distributions of butterflies and birds in the Great Basin region of Nevada, USA. The program seeks to provide biodiversity managers with tools for monitoring broad-scale distributions and to assist in landscape-scale management of biodiversity in a region that is suffering increased human impacts. |
