Modelling the habitat of the endangered Carpentarian Grasswren (Amytornis dorotheae): The importance of spatio-temporal habitat availability in a fire prone landscape

Species distribution modelling (SDM), a tool increasingly adopted to quantify geographic range size, often predicts species’ distributions as static. However, habitat availability may exhibit spatial and temporal variation when dynamic processes, such as fire, determine suitability. Static SDM approaches may not satisfactorily represent this dynamic process. We investigated the potential use of SDM to quantify dynamic habitat availability by applying the MaxEnt SDM technique to model the habitat of the Carpentarian Grasswren (Amytornis dorotheae), an endangered Australian passerine dependent on long unburnt vegetation in a fire prone system. By adjusting a typical SDM approach to incorporate the dynamic nature of fire, we modelled the spatio-temporal variation of suitable habitat over 12 years and compared it to a static modelling approach. Incorporating fire as a dynamic process increased the importance of the fire variable to models (from 35% permutation importance) and improved model performance, as evaluated by the AUC using cross-validation. Our dynamic model revealed sizeable temporal variation in the area and spatial arrangement of suitable habitat that was not apparent in the static model. This result may partly solve the mystery of why the species occurs as widely separated populations despite the presence of seemingly suitable intervening habitat. In areas where the species is no longer found, habitat availability was less consistent due to frequent fire, and fire refugia was more limited and isolated, when compared to sites with recent records. These results demonstrate that, when compared to a static approach, a dynamic SDM approach can lead to improved understanding of dynamic ecological processes, and their impact on a species

Restoring habitat for fire-impacted species’ across degraded Australian landscapes

In the summer of 2019–2020, southern Australia experienced the largest fires on record, detrimentally impacting the habitat of native species, many of which were already threatened by past and current anthropogenic land use. A large-scale restoration effort to improve degraded species habitat would provide fire-affected species with the chance to recover and persist in burnt and unburnt habitat. To facilitate this, decision-makers require information on priority species needs for restoration intervention, the suite of potential restoration interventions, and the priority locations for applying these interventions. We prioritize actions in areas where restoration would most likely provide cost-effective benefits to priority species (defined by each species proportion of habitat burned, threat status, and vulnerability to fires), by integrating current and future species habitat suitability maps with spatially modelled costs of restoration interventions such as replanting, removing invasive species, and implementing ecologically appropriate fire management. We show that restoring the top ∼69% (112 million hectares) of the study region (current and future distributions of priority species) accounts for, on average, 95% of current and future habitat for every priority species and costs ∼AUD$73 billion yr−1 (AUD$650 hectare−1 yr−1 ) annualized over 30 years. This effort would include restoration actions over 6 million hectares of fire-impacted habitat, costing ∼AUD$8.8 billion/year. Large scale restoration efforts are often costly but can have significant societal co-benefits beyond biodiversity conservation. We also show that up to 291 MtCO2 (∼150 Mt DM) of carbon could be sequestered by restoration efforts, resulting in approximately AUD$253 million yr−1 in carbon market revenue if all carbon was remunerated. Our approach highlights the scale, costs, and benefits of targeted restoration activities both inside and outside of the immediate bushfire footprint over vast areas of different land tenures.Michelle Ward, Ayesha Tulloch, Romola Stewart, Hugh P Possingham, Sarah Legge, Rachael V Gallagher, Erin M Graham, Darren Southwell, David Keith, Kingsley Dixon, Chuanji Yong, Josie Carwardine, Tim Cronin, April E Reside, and James E M Watso

Modification of forests by people means only 40% of remaining forests have high ecosystem integrity

Many global environmental agendas, including halting biodiversity loss, reversing land degradation, and limiting climate change, depend upon retaining forests with high ecological integrity, yet the scale and degree of forest modification remain poorly quantified and mapped. By integrating data on observed and inferred human pressures and an index of lost connectivity, we generate a globally consistent, continuous index of forest condition as determined by the degree of anthropogenic modification. Globally, only 17.4 million km2 of forest (40.5%) has high landscape-level integrity (mostly found in Canada, Russia, the Amazon, Central Africa, and New Guinea) and only 27% of this area is found in nationally designated protected areas. Of the forest inside protected areas, only 56% has high landscape-level integrity. Ambitious policies that prioritize the retention of forest integrity, especially in the most intact areas, are now urgently needed alongside current efforts aimed at halting deforestation and restoring the integrity of forests globally

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02