Blog Posts

Congratulations to Annalie for completing her PhD fieldwork

17/10/2018

Well done to Annalie for finishing an epic fieldwork programme involving a mix of camera trapping and vegetation measuring in the Otways, and pitfall-trap digging, reptile trapping, snake wrangling, camera trapping and yet more vegetation measuring in western Victoria.

The reptile trappers of the future will be particularly grateful to Annalie for taking on the lion's share of the pitfall-trap hole digging.

Huge thanks to everyone who's helped with collection of the field data. Annalie will present results from her first data paper at the ESA (Ecological Society of Australia) conference in Brisbane in November, and expects to wrap up her thesis in 2020.

The sun shone on Annalie's final field trip last week (photo credit Patiksha (Pat) Bappoo).

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Biotelemetry marches on: find out how to build your own GPS device

11/8/2018

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Click the image to watch a VIDEO showing how you can make your own GPS device step-by-step

Ever wanted to GPS-track an animal but couldn’t afford the gear? Then our new paper – arising from Manuela Fisher’s PhD – is just what you need.

We bought off-the-shelf GPS units, tinkered with them, and turned them into cost-effective animal trackers. Just the ticket for acquiring high resolution movement data at a fraction of the commercial rate. And – wait for it – the data get sent to your computer via the mobile phone network. Just sit back and count the fixes.

We put our trackers through their paces along a continuum from open urban areas to dense forest. Except for the odd failure, the trackers performed well under all conditions – even at the bottom of deep gullys under dense canopy! We hope that trackers like ours will help researchers collect more data on more individuals, and increase the quality of research outputs. Don’t you just love technology? Biotelemetry marches on!

Fischer, M., Parkins, K., Maizels, K., Sutherland, D.R., Allan, B.M., Coulson, G. & Di Stefano, J. (2018). Biotelemetry marches on: A cost-effective GPS device for monitoring terrestrial wildlife. PLoS ONE 13(7): e0199617.

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Please join us in Casterton for our information day!

10/7/2018

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Fire & Fragmentation Project Information Day

Casterton Town Hall, 67 Henty Street
Tuesday 7 August, 10:30-15:30
Morning tea and lunch provided

Our Information Day will be an opportunity to:

hear about our current work and plans, and
discuss priorities for fire research, conservation and management in the region and further afield.

Find a provisional program below, and please RSVP by Monday 30 July.

We look forward to seeing you!

Click here to rsvp

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One bag of litter is never enough

28/6/2018

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Most of us headed out to Casterton to spend a week taking photos of vegetation (x5400) and collecting bags of litter (x1080). No camera is sufficiently wide-angled to capture this many litter bags. We built a litter mountain in the lounge room. We had four vehicles and had to pile the litter on the roofs to get it all home.*

The purpose of this vegetation-measuring extravaganza was to better understand why reptiles prefer some sites over others, as part of the Fire & Fragmentation Project. Unfortunately, litter depth doesn't vary much in western Vic and eastern SA, so the tried and true method of sticking a ruler into the litter wasn't going to cut it.

Annalie gamely undertook the process of drying and weighing the haul. Helpfully she's illustrated the process for us, should we ever feel a desire to embark on a litter marathon of our own.

*Slight embellishment, but there really was a lot!

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New paper on edge effects in fire-prone landscapes

25/5/2018

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Different types of fire edges

In a new paper arising from Kate's PhD, we review the literature on fire, fauna, and edge effects to summarise current knowledge and identify knowledge gaps. We then develop a conceptual model to predict faunal responses to fire edges and present an agenda for future research.

Faunal abundance at fire edges changes over time, but patterns depend on species' traits and resource availability. Responses are also influenced by edge architecture (e.g., size and shape), site and landscape context, and spatial scale. However, data are limited and the influence of fire edges on both local abundance and regional distributions of fauna is largely unknown.

Our conceptual model combines several drivers of faunal fire responses (biophysical properties, regime attributes, species' traits) and will therefore lead to improved predictions. To aid the incorporation of new data into our predictive framework, our model has been designed as a Bayesian Network, a statistical tool capable of analysing complex environmental relationships, dealing with data gaps, and generating testable hypotheses.

Please download the paper to find out more.

Parkins, K., York, A. & Di Stefano, J. (2018). Edge effects in fire-prone landscapes: Ecological importance and implications for fauna. Ecology and Evolution. 00:1-12.

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Another PhD completion! Congratulations to Kate Parkins!

24/4/2018

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Kate presented her PhD completion seminar last week and is a (possum) whisker away from submitting her thesis. Her research focussed on edges, which are ecologically important environmental features that have been well researched in agricultural and urban landscapes but remain poorly understood in natural systems.

Fire is an agent of edge creation and a globally important driver of biome distribution and community composition, yet little is known about how fire edges affect ecological processes in flammable ecosystems. While edge effects and faunal-fire responses have been well studied independently, how animals respond to fire edges remains poorly understood.

Kate's thesis explores this knowledge gap focusing on the influence of fire edges on fauna, and discusses some methodological advances for ecological field studies. Her study sites were in Victoria's beautiful Central Highlands where she invested enormous energy installing remote cameras, trapping bush rats and agile antechinus, and fitting pesky-but-cute mountain brushtail possums with GPS collars. The possums in particular played very hard to get, but Kate's persistence paid off and she's currently putting the finishing touches on her analyses.

Congratulations Kate on your epic achievement!

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Congratulations to Manuela Fischer on her PhD completion!

8/4/2018

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Manuela gave her completion seminar on Friday and is moments away from submitting her thesis. Her exciting project involved use of GPS data and experimental exclosures to investigate resource selection, road crossing behaviour and browsing impact of the abundant native swamp wallaby. Her study took place on Phillip Island, a landscape of natural and human-modified patches, dissected by roads.

She found that wallabies modulate their selection of resources on a circadian basis to optimise the use of resources under anthropogenic disturbance. Although natural vegetation patches are likely to be used, patches of high anthropogenic disturbances are tolerated at night, when disturbances are less. She also showed that roads are avoided, especially during the day and that crossings are more likely when tree cover is high and water further away from the crossing location. Further, she demonstrated that in vegetation patches, wallabies suppress weed diversity, but do not influence native species diversity.

Her work has shed substantial light on the behaviour of Phillip Island's booming wallaby population. Well done Manuela on your inspiring work!

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News from the front

8/3/2018

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(The fieldwork front)

A team of reptile trappers and vegetation measurers has made Casterton its second home over the past couple of months.

This work forms part of Annalie and Sarah's PhD projects, and Kelvin's Masters project. Their missions are fairly ambitious and they've been assisted by Zahlia, Holly, Julian and Matt, as well as a crew of fantastic volunteers.

Please enjoy a selection of their favourite photos, and don't hesitate to get in touch via facebook if you're interested in helping.

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A holy grail for ecological fire management and research: What aspects of the fire regime make plants and animals tick?

25/2/2018

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Is that a ghostly presence on the right-hand-side or a tree stump?

Growth-stage optimisation determines the proportions of vegetation growth stages (categorical representations of time since fire) that maximise species diversity, providing an operational goal for fire managers. To date, optimisation has only been applied to growth stages in a fire management context but other aspects of fire regimes, such as severity, are also likely to influence species diversity.

In our new paper, we ask:
1 How do growth stage and fire severity influence plant and vertebrate species’ occurrence?
2 What mix of growth stages and fire severities maximises the diversity of these groups?

We surveyed birds, mammals and plants in the tall wet forest of Victoria’s Central Highlands, and found that growth stage predicted the occurrence of many species. Severity of the most recent fire was important over and above growth stage for a small subset of species; however, low-severity fire was a more important driver of species diversity than any other growth stage or severity category.

Growth stage is a good surrogate for developing conservation targets in tall wet forests, but does not capture the full range of species’ fire responses. More complex versions of growth stage optimisation that accommodate multiple fire-regime variables need to be explored to yield ecologically meaningful conservation goals.

Swan, M., Sitters, H., Cawson, J., Duff, T., Wibisono, Y. & York, A. (2018). Fire planning for multispecies conservation: Integrating growth stage and fire severity. Forest Ecology and Management 415-416: 85-97

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Join us for Bushfire & Biodiversity 2018!

22/1/2018

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Our graduate subject runs as a two-week intensive from Monday 9 - Friday 20 April at the Parkville Campus. It combines lectures, computer labs and a field trip to the beautiful Otway Ranges (including an occasional snap tournament, if you're lucky).

The course covers the effects of fire on aspects of biodiversity and ecological processes. Managers are committed to developing science-based ecological burning strategies which achieve both biodiversity and asset protection objectives. Increased knowledge of the ecological impacts of fire on plants and animals facilitates a better understanding of how more effective management can be achieved.

More information on Bushfire & Biodiversity and other fire-related graduate subjects is available here. The Handbook provides additional details.

Please contact us if you have any questions about the course.