Smart allocation of restoration funds over space and time.

A challenge for natural area managers is to ensure that public expenditure on land restoration is cost effective, efficient and transparent but this is difficult to achieve in practice, especially when there are many possible projects across multiple years. Here we develop a "roadmap" for investment in land restoration. It explicitly considers space, time and their interaction, in relation to ecological outcomes and restoration costs (and their variation in time and space).

Tropical Rainforest Restoration Plantations Are Slow to Restore the Soil Biological and Organic Carbon Characteristics of Old Growth Rainforest.

Widespread and continuing losses of tropical old-growth forests imperil global biodiversity and alter global carbon (C) cycling. Soil organic carbon (SOC) typically declines with land use change from old-growth forest, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Ecological restoration plantations offer an established means of restoring aboveground biomass, structure and diversity of forests, but their capacity to recover the soil microbial community and SOC is unknown due to limited empirical data and consensus on the mechanisms of SOC formation.

Use of seasonal forecasting to manage weather risk in ecological restoration.

Ecological restoration has widely variable outcomes from successes to partial or complete failures, and there are diverse perspectives on the factors that influence the likelihood of success. However, not much is known about how these factors are perceived, and whether people's perceptions match realities. We surveyed 307 people involved in the restoration of native vegetation across Australia to identify their perceptions on the factors influencing the success of restoration projects.

Revision of the Western Australian pebble-mimic dragon species-group (Tympanocryptis cephalus: Reptilia: Agamidae).

Recent work on species complexes of the pebble-mimic dragons of the Australian genus Tympanocryptis has greatly clarified evolutionary relationships among taxa and also indicated that species diversity has been severely underestimated. Here we provide a morphological and molecular appraisal of variation in the T. cephalus species-group and find evidence for recognizing five species-level lineages from Western Australia.

Slow recovery of tropical old-field rainforest regrowth and the value and limitations of active restoration.

There is current debate about the potential for secondary regrowth to rescue tropical forests from an otherwise inevitable cascade of biodiversity loss due to land clearing and scant evidence to test how well active restoration may accelerate recovery. We used site chronosequences to compare developmental trajectories of vegetation between self-organized (i.e.

Detectability in Audio-Visual Surveys of Tropical Rainforest Birds: The Influence of Species, Weather and Habitat Characteristics.

Indices of relative abundance do not control for variation in detectability, which can bias density estimates such that ecological processes are difficult to infer. Distance sampling methods can be used to correct for detectability, but in rainforest, where dense vegetation and diverse assemblages complicate sampling, information is lacking about factors affecting their application. Rare species present an additional challenge, as data may be too sparse to fit detection functions.

Early response of soil properties and function to riparian rainforest restoration.

Reforestation of riparian zones is increasingly practiced in many regions for purposes of biodiversity conservation, bank stabilisation, and improvement in water quality. This is in spite of the actual benefits of reforestation for recovering underlying soil properties and function remaining poorly understood. Here we compare remnant riparian rainforest, pasture and reforestation plantings aged 2-20 years in an Australian subtropical catchment on ferrosols to determine the extent to which reforestation restores key soil properties.

The role of integrative taxonomy in the conservation management of cryptic species: the taxonomic status of endangered earless dragons (Agamidae: Tympanocryptis) in the grasslands of Queensland, Australia.

Molecular phylogenetics is increasingly highlighting the prevalence of cryptic species, where morphologically similar organisms have long independent evolutionary histories. When such cryptic species are known to be declining in numbers and are at risk of extinction due to a range of threatening processes, the disjunction between molecular systematics research and conservation policy becomes a significant problem. We investigate the taxonomic status of Tympanocryptis populations in Queensland, which have previously been assigned to T.

Overcoming barriers to seedling regeneration during forest restoration on tropical pasture land and the potential value of woody weeds.

Combating the legacy of deforestation on tropical biodiversity requires the conversion to forest of large areas of established pasture, where barriers to native plant regeneration include competition with pasture grasses and poor propagule supply (seed availability). In addition, initial woody plants that colonise pasture are often invasive, non-native species whose ecological roles and management in the context of forest regeneration are contested. In a restoration experiment at two 0.

Current analogues of future climate indicate the likely response of a sensitive montane tropical avifauna to a warming world.

Among birds, tropical montane species are likely to be among the most vulnerable to climate change, yet little is known about how climate drives their distributions, nor how to predict their likely responses to temperature increases. Correlative models of species' environmental niches have been widely used to predict changes in distribution, but direct tests of the relationship between key variables, such as temperature, and species' actual distributions are few. In the absence of historical data with which to compare observations and detect shifts, space-for-time substitutions, where warmer locations are used as analogues of future conditions, offer an opportunity to test for species' responses to climate.

Evidence of constrained phenotypic evolution in a cryptic species complex of agamid lizards.

Lineages that exhibit little morphological change over time provide a unique opportunity to explore whether nonadaptive or adaptive processes explain the conservation of morphology over evolutionary time scales. We provide the most comprehensive evaluation to date of the evolutionary processes leading to morphological similarity among species in a cryptic species complex, incorporating two agamid lizard species (Diporiphora magna and D. bilineata).

Potential for mountaintop boulder fields to buffer species against extreme heat stress under climate change.

Species may circumvent or minimize some impacts resulting from climate change by utilizing microhabitats that buffer against extreme events (e.g., heat waves).

Abundance and the environmental niche: environmental suitability estimated from niche models predicts the upper limit of local abundance.

Ecologists seek to understand patterns of distribution and abundance of species. Studies of distribution often use occurrence data to build models of the environmental niche of a species. Environmental suitability (ES) derived from such models may be used to predict the potential distributions of species.

Towards an integrated framework for assessing the vulnerability of species to climate change.

Climate change is a major threat to global biodiversity. A novel integrated framework to assess vulnerability and prioritize research and management action aims to improve our ability to respond to this emerging crisis.