A method to identify drivers of societal change likely to affect natural assets in the future, illustrated with Australia's native biodiversity.

Human society has a profound adverse effect on natural assets as human populations increase and as global climate changes. We need to envisage different futures that encompass plausible human responses to threats and change, and become more mindful of their likely impacts on natural assets. We describe a method for developing a set of future scenarios for a natural asset at national scale under ongoing human population growth and climate change.

Potential future scenarios for Australia's native biodiversity given on-going increases in human population.

Most natural assets, including native biodiversity (our focus), are under increasing threat from direct (loss of habitat, hunting) and indirect (climate change) human actions. Most human impacts arise from increasing human populations coupled with rises in per capita resource use. The rates of change of human actions generally outpace those to which the biota can respond or adapt.

A bust but no boom: responses of floodplain bird assemblages during and after prolonged drought.

Climate change alters the frequency and severity of extreme events, such as drought. Such events will be increasingly important in shaping communities as climate change intensifies. The ability of species to withstand extreme events (resistance) and to recover once adverse conditions abate (resilience) will determine their persistence.

Relating demographic characteristics of a small mammal to remotely sensed forest-stand condition.

Many ecological systems around the world are changing rapidly in response to direct (land-use change) and indirect (climate change) human actions. We need tools to assess dynamically, and over appropriate management scales, condition of ecosystems and their responses to potential mitigation of pressures. Using a validated model, we determined whether stand condition of floodplain forests is related to densities of a small mammal (a carnivorous marsupial, Antechinus flavipes) in 60,000 ha of extant river red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) forests in south-eastern Australia in 2004, 2005 and 2011.

Genetic reconstruction of the population dynamics of a carnivorous marsupial (Antechinus flavipes) in response to floods.

Human activities such as regulating river flows, logging and removing fallen timber adversely affect floodplain ecosystems around the world. Studies of the dynamics of floodplain-dwelling populations will help to understand the effects of altered flood regimes and to manage and restore floodplains. The yellow-footed antechinus (Antechinus flavipes) is the only small, native, carnivorous mammal (Marsupialia) on many degraded floodplains in south-eastern Australia, where its abundance appears to increase with proximity to floods, which is partly due to enhanced survival (as inferred from increased abundance of second-year females).

Functional analysis in Drosophila indicates that the NBCCS/PTCH1 mutation G509V results in activation of smoothened through a dominant-negative mechanism.

Mutations in the human homolog of the patched gene are associated with the developmental (and cancer predisposition) condition Nevoid Basal Cell Carcinoma Syndrome (NBCCS), as well as with sporadic basal cell carcinomas. Most mutations that have been identified in the germline of NBCCS patients are truncating or frameshift mutations, with amino acid substitutions rarely found. We show that a missense mutation in the sterol-sensing domain G509V acts as a dominant negative when assayed in vivo in Drosophila.