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 similar to 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 similar to 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 similar to 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 (similar to 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

Marxan with Zones: Software for optimal conservation based land- and sea-use zoning

Marxan is the most widely used conservation planning software in the world and is designed for solving complex conservation planning problems in landscapes and seascapes. In this paper we describe a substantial extension of Marxan called Marxan with Zones, a decision support tool that provides land-use zoning options in geographical regions for biodiversity conservation. We describe new functions designed to enhance the original Marxan software and expand on its utility as a decision support tool. The major new element in the decision problem is allowing any parcel of land or sea to be allocated to a specific zone, not just reserved or unreserved. Each zone then has the option of its own actions, objectives and constraints, with the flexibility to define the contribution of each zone to achieve targets for pre-specified features (e.g. species or habitats). The objective is to minimize the total cost of implementing the zoning plan while ensuring a variety of conservation and land-use objectives are achieved. We outline the capabilities, limitations and additional data requirements of this new software and perform a comparison with the original version of Marxan. We feature a number of case studies to demonstrate the functionality of the software and highlight its flexibility to address a range of complex spatial planning problems. These studies demonstrate the design of multiple-use marine parks in both Western Australia and California, and the zoning of forest use in East Kalimantan

Mass spawning in the Acroporidae on the Ningaloo Reef Tract

The development and maturation of oocytes, and the timing of gamete release was documented for four Acroporidae, Acropora formosa, Acropora hyacinthus, Montipora capricomis and Montipora spumosa. Maturation was determined by the pigmentation seen in oocytes altering their appearance from white to pink or red in the Acropora spp. and from white to brown in the Montipora spp. The maturation of oocytes increased rapidly in the two weeks before gamete release. This study has shown that sexual reproduction in the broadcast spawning Acroporidae occurred over the March to May period on the Ningaloo Reef Tract (NRT) in 1993. Interspecific synchrony in coral spawning was recorded within the region of Coral Bay and spawning was predominantly confined to a period extending from the 8th to 10th nights following the full moon in April. Over this period, synchronization of gamete release was recorded in 61.5% of the population of four Acroporidae, and observed in situ for many other species. Whilst this major period of gamete release was observed for Acropora formosa, A.hyacinthus, Monitpora capricomis and Montipora spumosa, a proportion of the population for each species did not participate in the major April Full Moon (FM) spawning event thus gametogenesis is approximately synchronous. Spawning extended over three consecutive months during late summer/autumn, at times associated with the Full and New moons between March and May. Spawning periods were observed between the 6th and 11th nights following either a New or Full moon. Only a small proportion (less than 10%) of each species spawned in periodocity with the New moons between March and May, however a significant proportion of the population participated in spawning events following the Full moons over this time. Furthermore a significant proportion (22%) of the two Montipora species, released gametes over the May Full moon spawning period. The way in which a proportion of the population co-ordinates the timing of gamete release to occur over brief distinct periods leads to seasonality in reproduction and ultimately a major spawning event, of which participating species can be referred to as 'quasi-mass spawners'. Although similarities exist between the synchronosity in spawning seen on the Ningaloo Reef Tract and the Great Barrier Reef, spawning on the Ningaloo Reef Tract occurs 4-5 months after mass spawning on the Great Barrier Reef and results from the present study show that there is no evidence for the occurance of a spring spawning event at Ningaloo Reef. The total mean oocyte volume (mm3) per polyp was recorded for the four species and ranged from 0.18mm3 to 0.68mm3 Montipora spp. were shown to exert a lower reproductive effort than Acropora spp. which typically had large but fewer oocytes within the polyp, than Montipora spp. Acropora hyacinthus had an average of 7.0 mature oocytes per polyp and A.formosa had 9.8 oocytes per polyp which was less than the two Monitpora species, M.capricomis and M.spumosa with 13.0 and 11.0 oocytes per polyp respectively. Mean oocyte volume varied significantly between all species except A.hyacinthus and A.formosa, where the difference between mean oocyte volume of these species did not vary to a significant level. This shows that these two species of common genera (Acropora ) were not shown to vary significantly in either oocyte volume or mean number of oocytes per polyp. The total mean oocyte volume is a measure of reproductive effort, and presents here, data which has not previously been recorded for these species on the NRT. For the purpose of studies which may document the reproductive effort of these species at a later date, the results presented here can provide determining potential as indices of sub-lethal stress

Using the Zonae Cogito Decision Support System: A manual prepared by Applied Environmental Decision Analysis Centre

This software was written by Matthew Watts and Romola Stewart from The Ecology Centre, University of Queensland. Zonae Cogito comes from the Latin 'Zonae', meaning zones, and 'Cogito', meaning to think or reflect on. In other words, the title means to think about zones. Within this manual we will refer to Zonae Cogito as ZC. The purpose of the software is to act as a decision support system and database management system for the family of Marxan software. It incorporates open source GIS software components, and is a freely available software package

Using multivariate analysis to deliver conservation planning products that align with practitioner needs

This software note describes an extension to the conservation planning package Marxan in which multiple solutions can be evaluated instead of only relying on the measures of best solution and irreplaceability. For this extension we coupled Marxan with the statistical software R. The pool of possible conservation plans is transferred from Marxan into R- which returns an ordination plot, as well as a cluster dendrogram that can be used to evaluate similarity of solutions. Also, the most efficient solutions per group are flagged. We believe that identification of alternative planning options facilitates review and implementation of Marxan solutions as negotiating parties have multiple alternative starting points

Wild Australia program - South west Australia science project

This is the final report for the Pew South-west Australia Science Project, an independent analysis of marine sanctuaries for the Commonwealth's South-west Marine Region conducted by The Ecology Centre under contract to the Pew Charitable Trusts. the report concludes all of the deliverables under the contract terms: Biophysical Resource Assessment of the SW Marine Region, Scientific Consensus Statement, and a Marxan analyis for the SW Marine Region

Using multivariate analysis to deliver conservation planning products that align with practitioner needs

This software note describes an extension to the conservation planning package Marxan in which multiple solutions can be evaluated instead of only relying on the measures of best solution and irreplaceability. For this extension we coupled Marxan with the statistical software R. The pool of possible conservation plans is transferred from Marxan into R - which returns an ordination plot, as well as a cluster dendrogram that can be used to evaluate similarity of solutions. Also, the most efficient solutions per group are flagged. We believe that identification of alternative planning options facilitates review and implementation of Marxan solutions as negotiating parties have multiple alternative starting points