Alex Maisey

• PhD Student at La Trobe University

There is increasing pressure for improved traceability through agricultural supply chains and for farmers to report on their natural resource use, environmental performance, and biodiversity management. Metrics or indices of natural capital are often used in sustainability reporting, but to be effective, they need to represent the condition and ext...

Aim: To compare field-based evidence of plant and animal responses to fire with remotely sensed signals of fire heterogeneity and post-fire biomass recovery. Location: South-eastern Australia; New South Wales. Time Period: 2019–2022. Major Taxa Studied: A total of 982 species of plants and animals, in eight taxonomic groups: amphibians, birds, fish...

Aim To compare field‐based evidence of plant and animal responses to fire with remotely sensed signals of fire heterogeneity and post‐fire biomass recovery. Location South‐eastern Australia; New South Wales. Time Period 2019–2022. Major Taxa Studied A total of 982 species of plants and animals, in eight taxonomic groups: amphibians, birds, fish,...

Ecosystem engineers shape ecological communities worldwide by modifying the habitats of other taxa. Engineering activities may generate feedbacks that benefit the engineers themselves, though such evidence is sparse. The superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae), a ground‐dwelling species of moist eucalypt forests in south‐eastern Australia, enginee...

Aim: Increasing interest in holistic measurement of the response of fauna communities to interventions requires suitable community condition metrics. However, the development of such metrics is hindered by the absence of broad-scale typologies at suitable spatial and ecological resolutions. We aimed to derive a preliminary typology of terrestrial b...

Natural capital accounting can help farmers and producers meet global demands to disclose supply chain impacts on biodiversity and to reverse biodiversity declines in farmland. To date, methods have been limited in their ability to reliably represent biodiversity, especially fauna, and are typically prepared at the regional scale, not at the farm s...

With large wildfires becoming more frequent1,2, we must rapidly learn how megafires impact biodiversity to prioritize mitigation and improve policy. A key challenge is to discover how interactions among fire-regime components, drought and land tenure shape wildfire impacts. The globally unprecedented3,4 2019–2020 Australian megafires burnt more tha...

Agricultural lands that produce food, fibre and biofuels to sustain the human population represent the most widespread land use on Earth. Conserving global biodiversity will depend, largely, on how effectively species, communities and ecological processes are sustained in agricultural landscapes worldwide. The authors outline concepts for the conse...

Revegetation plantings are a key activity in farmland restoration and are commonly assumed to support biotic communities that, with time, replicate those of reference habitats. Restoration outcomes, however, can be highly variable and difficult to predict; hence there is value in quantifying restoration success to improve future efforts. We test th...

Understanding nest site selection is critical to developing effective conservation management actions. The Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) is one of many endemic species extensively impacted by Australia’s unprecedented 2019–2020 megafires. Over a period of 5 months, an estimated 43% of the entire range of this slow-breeding species was bu...

Abstract Ecosystem engineers that modify the soil and ground‐layer properties exert a strong influence on vegetation communities in ecosystems worldwide. Understanding the interactions between animal engineers and vegetation is challenging when in the presence of large herbivores, as many vegetation communities are simultaneously affected by both e...

The creation of mechanically carved tree cavities to provide supplementary shelter for hollow-dependent wildlife is increasingly popular in conservation management programs. However, there is limited empirical evidence quantifying how the features of their design and broader placement within the landscape influence use by target fauna. In this stud...

Darwin argued that females’ “taste for the beautiful” drives the evolution of male extravagance,but sexual selection theory also predicts that extravagant ornaments can arise from sexual conflict and deception. The sensory trap hypothesis posits that elaborate sexual signals can evolve via antagonistic coevolution whereby one sex uses deceptive mim...

Ecosystem engineers physically modify their environment, thereby altering habitats for other organisms. Increasingly, “engineers” are recognized as an important focus for conservation and ecological restoration because their actions affect a range of ecosystem processes and thereby influence how ecosystems function. The Superb Lyrebird Menura novae...

Reproductive suppression, whereby individuals decrease the reproductive output of conspecific rivals, is well-studied in mammals, but while it is suspected to be widespread in birds, evidence of this phenomenon remains rare in this class. Here we provide compelling evidence of reproductive suppression in the Superb Lyrebird ( Menura novaehollandie...

Landscape heterogeneity, from both natural and anthropogenic causes, fundamentally influence the distribution of species. Conservation management requires an understanding of how species respond to heterogeneity at different spatial scales and whether differences may occur between demographic components of a species population. We examined the spat...

The Upwey Corridor Biodiversity Project has seen substantial investment by agencies and in‐kind voluntary work by the community over a ten year period. Comparison of Habitat Hectare scores prior to the project and after ten years showed that significant improvement in ecological condition of weed‐degraded areas is possible given adequate investment...

Members of the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Survey Group have recorded single-egg clutches as being the norm for the Superb Lyrebird Menura novaehollandiae in Sherbrooke Forest, but occasionally there are two eggs present in a single nest. Here, we report the first record of a three-egg clutch for the Superb Lyrebird. On 20 August 2016, we discovered a lyre...

Nests provide essential ecological services to breeding birds, and the location and architectural characteristics of nests may vary to maximise reproductive success. We investigated variation in nest-characteristics within a breeding population of Superb Lyrebirds (Menura novaehollandiae) in south-eastern Australia over 14 years. Lyrebird nests con...

All human cultures have music and dance [1, 2], and the two activities are so closely integrated that many languages use just one word to describe both [1, 3]. Recent research points to a deep cognitive connection between music and dance-like movements in humans [2, 4-6], fueling speculation that music and dance have coevolved [2, 7, 8] and prompti...