Recent climate-driven ecological change across a continent as perceived through local ecological knowledge

Documenting effects of climate change is an important step towards designing mitigation and adaptation responses. Impacts of climate change on terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystems have been well-documented in the Northern Hemisphere, but long-term data to detect change in the Southern Hemisphere are limited, and some types of change are generally difficult to measure. Here we present a novel approach using local ecological knowledge to facilitate a continent-scale view of climate change impacts on terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystems that people have perceived in Australia. We sought local knowledge using a national web-based survey, targeting respondents with close links to the environment (e.g. farmers, ecologists), and using a custom-built mapping tool to ask respondents to describe and attribute recent changes they had observed within an area they knew well. Results drawn from 326 respondents showed that people are already perceiving simple and complex climate change impacts on hundreds of species and ecosystems across Australia, significantly extending the detail previously reported for the continent. While most perceived trends and attributions remain unsubstantiated, \u3e35 reported anecdotes concurred with examples in the literature, and \u3e20 were reported more than once. More generally, anecdotes were compatible with expectations from global climate change impact frameworks, including examples across the spectrum from organisms (e.g. increased mortality in \u3e75 species), populations (e.g. changes in recruitment or abundance in \u3e100 species, phenological change in \u3e50 species), and species (e.g. \u3e80 species newly arriving or disappearing), to communities and landscapes (e.g. \u3e50 examples of altered ecological interactions). The overarching pattern indicated by the anecdotes suggests that people are more often noticing climate change losers (typically native species) than winners in their local areas, but with observations of potential ‘adaptation in action’ via compositional and phenological change and through arrivals and range shifts (particularly for native birds and exotic plants). A high proportion of climate change-related anecdotes also involved cumulative or interactive effects of land use. We conclude that targeted elicitation of local ecological knowledge about climate change impacts can provide a valuable complement to data-derived knowledge, substantially extending the volume of explicit examples and offering a foundation for further investigation

Learning together for and with the Martuwarra Fitzroy River

Co-production across scientific and Indigenous knowledge systems has become a cornerstone of research to enhance knowledge, practice, ethics, and foster sustainability transformations. However, the profound differences in world views and the complex and contested histories of nation-state colonisation on Indigenous territories, highlight both opportunities and risks for Indigenous people when engaging with knowledge co-production. This paper investigates the conditions under which knowledge co-production can lead to improved Indigenous adaptive environmental planning and management among remote land-attached Indigenous peoples through a case study with ten Traditional Owner groups in the Martuwarra (Fitzroy River) Catchment in Western Australia’s Kimberley region. The research team built a 3D map of the river and used it, together with an interactive table-top projector, to bring together both scientific and Indigenous spatial knowledge. Participatory influence mapping, aligned with Traditional Owner priorities to achieve cultural governance and management planning goals set out in the Fitzroy River Declaration, investigated power relations. An analytical framework, examining underlying mechanisms of social learning, knowledge promotion and enhancing influence, based on different theories of change, was applied to unpack the immediate outcomes from these activities. The analysis identified that knowledge co-production activities improved the accessibility of the knowledge, the experiences of the knowledge users, strengthened collective identity and partnerships, and strengthened Indigenous-led institutions. The focus on cultural governance and management planning goals in the Fitzroy River Declaration enabled the activities to directly affect key drivers of Indigenous adaptive environmental planning and management—the Indigenous-led institutions. The nation-state arrangements also gave some support to local learning and decision-making through a key Indigenous institution, Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council. Knowledge co-production with remote land-attached Indigenous peoples can improve adaptive environmental planning and management where it fosters learning together, is grounded in the Indigenous-led institutions and addresses their priorities

Implementing CARE Principles to Link Noongar Language and Knowledge to Western Science through the Atlas of Living Australia

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), Australia's national online biodiversity database, is partnering with the Noongar Boodjar Language Centre (NBALC) to promote Indigenous language and knowledge by including Noongar names for plants and animals in the ALA. Names are included in the ALA species page for each plant and animal and knowledge is built into the Noongar Plant and Animal online Encyclopedia, hosted in the ALA. We demonstrate the use of CARE principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics (Carroll et al. 2020)) to engage, support, and deliver the project and outcomes to the Noongar people and communities working with us. The ALA addresses the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016) for data management and stewardship ensuring data are findable, accessable, interoperable, and reusable. The ALA is partnering with NBALC in Perth to ensure all sharing of Noongar data is on Noongar terms. NBALC and ALA have been working with Noongar-Wadjari, a southern clan from the Fitzgerald River area in Western Australia, to collect, protect and share their language and traditional knowledge for local species.*1The Noongar Encyclopedia project exhibits Collective Benefit because it is a co-innovation project that was co-designed by NBALC and ALA. The project’s activities were designed by the Community-endorsed representatives, the Knowledge Holders. The aims and aspirations of the Community were included in the project design to ensure equitable outcomes. NBALC’s more than 25-year relationship with the Community, and as Noongar people themselves, meant they had a good understanding of what the Community might want from the project. These assumptions were tested and refined during the first Community consultation, before the project plan was finalised. The Community are keen for their traditional knowledge to be shared and freely available to their Community. The ALA only shared knowledge that has passed through strict consent processes. It is seen as a safe and stable digital environment for now and the future, and where the traditional knowledge can be accessed freely and easily. The link to western science knowledge is secondary to knowledge sharing for most of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities that the ALA are working with although the benefits of scientists having access to both knowledge systems is seen as a positive step in care for Country into the future.The Noongar Encyclopedia project ensures Noongar Authority to Control these data because NBALC, as an Aboriginal organisation, led by Noongar people, understands the rights and interests of the Communities we are working with. Protection of these rights and inclusion of Community interests are written into the project methodology as part of the project co-design. It is important to ensure the project is working with the right people within the Community. NBALC facilitates this by finding people who hold traditional knowledge, and can trace the stories back to their source. The appropriate governance of data is ensured because all collected data are stored and managed by NBALC. Project design includes rolling consent from Knowledge Holders who review all data collected, add or edit as needed, and give or deny consent for knowledge to be shared publicly through the ALA. The Noongar Encyclopedia project design ensures we understand the Responsibilities (CARE "R") involved in Indigenous data collection, protection, management and sharing. Through the partnership with the ALA, the NBALC is expanding its capabilities and capacity for digital data collection and management. The Community is building its capabilities and capacity for working with linguists and scientists. Including the Noongar language and traditional knowledge in the ALA shows non-Indigenous users of the ALA that there is another way to name, look at, talk about and record knowledge about species. This view differs from Western science. The Noongar view everything to be connected and group things based on their use and connectivity. Western science tends to classify species based on their physical attributes. Language is the key to this alternate world view. The ALA now publishes the scientific name, the English name and the Noongar word/s. The ALA links to the alternate science view of these species through the Noongar Encyclopedia, and two other Ecological Knowledge Encyclopedias (Kamilaroi and South East Arnhem Land).The Noongar Encyclopedia project is constantly subjected to Ethical assessment by the Community and through stringent Western ethical assessments and reviews. The Community ethical assessment included the project undergoing a number of evaluations before it started. The projects are co-designed with NBALC to ensure they are within protocol and community expectations. The ALA are then introduced to the Community. The Community decide if they are interested in the project, if it meets their aspirations, if they feel comfortable working with the ALA and potentially other scientists. Contributing scientists or academics are introduced to the Community by the NBALC. The Community maintains the right to decline to work with any introduced scientist or academic. All contributors are informed of this protocol before they are introduced to the Community.The Noongar Plant and Animal Encyclopedia was published in September 2021 (NBALC 2021)

Recent ecological change in Australia survey 2017

Source data for: Prober SM, Raisbeck-Brown N, Williams KJ, Porter N, Leviston Z, Dickson F. Recent climate-driven ecological change across a continent as perceived through local ecological knowledge. PLoS ONE. Max latitude: 9°0′0″ S Min latitude: 56°0′0″ S Max longitude: 169°0′0″ E Min longitude: 110°0′0″ E Coordinate reference system: WGS8

Summarised data on 16S exact genetic variants of rhizobia associated with Acacia acuminata in Western Australia

This CSV file contains data on the presence or absence, and read counts for 16S exact genetic variants found associated with individual Acacia trees within 24 sites. Also included is metadata for the sites, including all predictors used in the associated paper. Please see associated paper for full details on sample collection and processing

Raw 16S Illumina reads (miseq) of rhizobia collected from soil surrounding Acacia acuminata trees.

These sequences come from pooled cultured isolates. Isolates were derived from individual nodules from Acacia acuminata seedling used to trap rhizobia strains from soil that was collected around individual Acacia acuminata trees in the field. This file contains miseq runs for 72 samples, where each sample is the pooled isolates collected from soil surrounding a single Acacia tree. Please see associated paper for full details on sample collection and preparation. The zip file contains two fastq.gz files for each sample, for the forward (R1) and reverse (R2) reads

Recent climate-driven ecological change across a continent as perceived through local ecological knowledge.

Documenting effects of climate change is an important step towards designing mitigation and adaptation responses. Impacts of climate change on terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystems have been well-documented in the Northern Hemisphere, but long-term data to detect change in the Southern Hemisphere are limited, and some types of change are generally difficult to measure. Here we present a novel approach using local ecological knowledge to facilitate a continent-scale view of climate change impacts on terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystems that people have perceived in Australia. We sought local knowledge using a national web-based survey, targeting respondents with close links to the environment (e.g. farmers, ecologists), and using a custom-built mapping tool to ask respondents to describe and attribute recent changes they had observed within an area they knew well. Results drawn from 326 respondents showed that people are already perceiving simple and complex climate change impacts on hundreds of species and ecosystems across Australia, significantly extending the detail previously reported for the continent. While most perceived trends and attributions remain unsubstantiated, >35 reported anecdotes concurred with examples in the literature, and >20 were reported more than once. More generally, anecdotes were compatible with expectations from global climate change impact frameworks, including examples across the spectrum from organisms (e.g. increased mortality in >75 species), populations (e.g. changes in recruitment or abundance in >100 species, phenological change in >50 species), and species (e.g. >80 species newly arriving or disappearing), to communities and landscapes (e.g. >50 examples of altered ecological interactions). The overarching pattern indicated by the anecdotes suggests that people are more often noticing climate change losers (typically native species) than winners in their local areas, but with observations of potential 'adaptation in action' via compositional and phenological change and through arrivals and range shifts (particularly for native birds and exotic plants). A high proportion of climate change-related anecdotes also involved cumulative or interactive effects of land use. We conclude that targeted elicitation of local ecological knowledge about climate change impacts can provide a valuable complement to data-derived knowledge, substantially extending the volume of explicit examples and offering a foundation for further investigation

Larger plants promote a greater diversity of symbiotic nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria associated with an Australian endemic legume

1. A major goal in microbial ecology is to understand the factors that structure bacterial communities across space and time. For microbes that are plant symbionts, community assembly processes can lead to either a positive or negative relationship between plant size or age and soil microbe diversity. Here, we evaluated the extent to which such relationships exist within a single legume species (Acacia acuminata) and their naturally occurring symbiotic nitrogen‐fixing bacteria (rhizobia). 2. We quantified the diversity of rhizobia that associate with A. acuminata trees of variable size spanning a large environmental gradient in southwest Australia (72 trees in 24 sites spread across ~300,000 km2), using metabarcoding. We modelled rhizobia diversity using 16S exact genetic variants, in a binomial multivariate statistical framework that controlled for climate and local soil characteristics. 3. We identified two major phylogenetic clades of rhizobia that associate with A. acuminata. Soil sampled at the base of larger Acacia trees contained a higher richness of rhizobia genetic variants. Each major clade responds differently to environmental factors (climate and soil characteristics), but the positive association between tree size and rhizobia genetic diversity was mainly driven by responses from one of the two clades. Overall tree size explained more variation than any other factor, resulting in a ~3‐fold increase in total richness and clade diversity from the smallest to the largest trees. 4. Synthesis. Previous studies have shown that plant host species is important in structuring microbial soil communities in the rhizosphere. Our results show that host size or age within a single plant species can also structure diversity of at least one group of soil microbes. A positive relationship between plant host size and rhizobia diversity suggests that hosts may modify the niche space of their surrounding soil (niche construction hypothesis) enabling a higher richness of microbial taxa. That different rhizobial groups responded differently to host size and other ecological factors suggests that rhizobia is not an ecologically uniform group, and that entirely neutral explanations for our results are unlikely. Host plants may be analogous to “islands,” where larger plant hosts may accumulate diversity over time, through migration opportunities.Australian Research Council, Grant/Award Number: DP110103168; Office of the Chief Executive Postdoctoral Fellowship; Centre for Biodiversity Analysis Ignition Gran

Data from: Larger plants promote a greater diversity of symbiotic nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria associated with an Australian endemic legume

A major goal in microbial ecology is to understand the factors that structure bacterial communities across space and time. For microbes that are plant symbionts, community assembly processes can lead to either a positive or negative relationship between plant size or age and soil microbe diversity. Here, we evaluated the extent to which such relationships exist within a single legume species (Acacia acuminata) and their naturally occurring symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria (rhizobia). 2. We quantified the diversity of rhizobia that associate with A. acuminata trees of variable size spanning a large environmental gradient in southwest Australia (72 trees in 24 sites spread across ~300,000 km2), using metabarcoding. We modelled rhizobia diversity using 16S exact genetic variants, in a binomial multivariate statistical framework that controlled for climate and local soil characteristics. 3. We identified two major phylogenetic clades of rhizobia that associate with A. acuminata. Soil sampled at the base of larger Acacia trees contained a higher richness of rhizobia genetic variants. Each major clade responds differently to environmental factors (climate and soil characteristics), but the positive association between tree size and rhizobia genetic diversity was mainly driven by responses from one of the two clades. Overall tree size explained more variation than any other factor, resulting in a ~3-fold increase in total richness and clade diversity from the smallest to the largest trees. 4. Synthesis. Previous studies have shown that plant host species is important in structuring microbial soil communities in the rhizosphere. Our results show that host size or age within a single plant species can also structure diversity of at least one group of soil microbes. A positive relationship between plant host size and rhizobia diversity suggests that hosts may modify the niche space of their surrounding soil (niche construction hypothesis) enabling a higher richness of microbial taxa. That different rhizobial groups responded differently to host size and other ecological factors suggests that rhizobia is not an ecologically uniform group, and that entirely neutral explanations for our results are unlikely. Host plants may be analogous to ‘islands’, where larger plant hosts may accumulate diversity over time, through migration opportunities