Corey J. A. Bradshaw

Flinders University · College of Science and Engineering

Insects have presented human society with some of its greatest development challenges by spreading diseases, consuming crops and damaging infrastructure. Despite the massive human and financial toll of invasive insects, cost estimates of their impacts remain sporadic, spatially incomplete and of questionable quality. Here we compile a comprehensive...

The timing, context and nature of the first people to enter Sahul is still poorly understood owing to a fragmented archaeological record. However, quantifying the plausible demographic context of this founding population is essential to determine how and why the initial peopling of Sahul occurred. We developed a stochastic, age-structured model usi...

We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms — including humanity — is in fact so great th...

The peopling of Sahul (the combined continent of Australia and New Guinea) represents the earliest continental migration and settlement event of solely anatomically modern humans, but its patterns and ecological drivers remain largely conceptual in the current literature. We present an advanced stochastic-ecological model to test the relative suppo...

The causes of Sahul’s megafauna extinctions remain uncertain, although several interacting factors were likely responsible. To examine the relative support for hypotheses regarding plausible ecological mechanisms underlying these extinctions, we constructed the first stochastic, age-structured models for 13 extinct megafauna species from five funct...

We describe the Australian Shark-Incident Database, formerly known as the Australian Shark-Attack File, which contains comprehensive reports of 1,196 shark bites that have occurred in Australia over 231 years (1791–2022). Data were collated by the Taronga Conservation Society Australia using purpose designed questionnaires provided to shark-bite vi...

Pleistocene archaeology in Australia has focussed on the survival and behaviour of Indigenous populations across Sahul during the Last Glacial Maximum (28.6 ± 2.8 ka to 17.7 ± 2.2 ka). A long-standing conceptual model proposes people occupied ecological refugia while abandoning drier regions during extreme climatic conditions, with inferred pattern...

1: Helicopter-based shooting is an effective management tool for vertebrate pest animals. However, animals in low-density populations can be difficult to locate visually. Thermal-imaging technologies in aerial culling can increase detections and increase control/eradication success; 2: We describe a method of using thermal equipment to assist in ae...

Reconstructing the patterns of expansion out of Africa and across the globe by modern Homo sapiens have been advanced using demographic and travel-cost models. However, modelled routes are ipso facto influenced by migration rates, and vice versa. It is therefore timely to combine these two intertwined phenomena in reconstructing the migratory histo...

The coronavirus pandemic provides us with an opportunity to reassess and reboot our relationship with nature. Reducing the pressures on our planet’s life-giving ecosystems will help solve converging environmental crises as well as benefit public health and well-being. Rather than piecemeal solutions to the rising probability and magnitude of zoonot...

In the face of mounting environmental and political challenges in river management, accurate and timely scientific information is required to inform policy development and guide effective management of waterways. The Murray–Darling Basin is Australia's largest river system by area and is the subject of a heavily contested series of water reforms re...

The coronavirus pandemic provides us with an opportunity to reassess and reboot our relationship with nature. Reducing the pressures on our planet’s life-giving ecosystems will help solve converging environmental crises as well as benefit public health and well-being. Rather than piecemeal solutions to the rising probability and magnitude of zoonot...

Extinctions stemming from environmental change often trigger trophic cascades and coextinctions. Bottom-up cascades occur when changes in the primary producers in a network elicit flow-on effects to higher trophic levels. However, it remains unclear what determines a species’ vulnerability to bottom-up cascades, and whether such cascades were a lar...

Persistent poaching fuelled by demand for elephant ivory and rhino horn continues to threaten these species. Despite international trade restrictions operating since the 1970s, limiting poaching has remained a substantial challenge over the last decade. The poaching economy of such storable goods is driven by a combination of persistent consumer de...

Extinctions stemming from environmental change often trigger trophic cascades and coextinctions. Bottom–up cascades occur when changes in the primary producers in a network elicit flow-on effects to higher trophic levels. However, it remains unclear what determines a species' vulnerability to bottom–up cascades and whether such cascades were a larg...

Although average contraceptive use has increased globally in recent decades, an estimated 222 million (26%) of women of child-bearing age worldwide face an unmet need for family planning - defined as a discrepancy between fertility preferences and contraception practice, or failing to translate desires to avoid pregnancy into preventative behaviour...

Background Dire forecasts predict that an increasingly hostile environment globally will increase the threats to human health. Infants and young children are especially at risk because children are particularly vulnerable to climate-related stressors. The childhood diseases most affected, the breadth and magnitude of future health problems and the...

Archaeological data and demographic modelling suggest that the peopling of Sahul required substantial populations, occurred rapidly within a few thousand years and encompassed environments ranging from hyper-arid deserts to temperate uplands and tropical rainforests. How this migration occurred and how humans responded to the physical environments...

Analysis of long-term trends in abundance provide insights into population dynamics. Population growth rates are the emergent interplay of fertility, survival, and dispersal, but the density feedbacks on some vital rates (component) can be decoupled from density feedback on population growth rates (ensemble). However, the mechanisms responsible for...

The pursuit of simple, yet fair, unbiased, and objective measures of researcher performance has occupied bibliometricians and the research community as a whole for decades. However, despite the diversity of available metrics, most are either complex to calculate or not readily applied in the most common assessment exercises (e.g., grant assessment,...

In their comment on our paper “Underestimating the challenges of avoiding a ghastly future” (Bradshaw et al., 2021), Bluwstein et al. (2021) attempt to contravene our exposé of the enormous challenges facing the entire human population from a rapidly degrading global environment. While we broadly agree with the need for multi-disciplinary solutions...

The legacy of deliberate and accidental introductions of invasive alien species to Australia has had a hefty economic toll, yet quantifying the magnitude of the costs associated with direct loss and damage, as well as for management interventions, remains elusive. This is because the reliability of cost estimates and under-sampling have not been de...

In the face of mounting environmental problems, it is essential that accurate and timely scientific information is available to inform policy development and guide management. Scientists have specialised knowledge necessary for evidenced-based decision making, but despite extensive literature on the interface between science and policy, there is li...

Feral cats are some of the most destructive invasive predators worldwide, particularly in insular environments; hence, density-reduction campaigns are often applied to alleviate the predation mortality they add to native fauna. Density-reduction and eradication efforts are costly procedures with important outcomes for native fauna recovery, so they...

The original publication described FosSahul 2.0, the updated version of the FosSahul database comprising collated and quality-rated megafauna fossil ages of the Late Quaternary from Sahul, as well as R code to run the algorithm that rated the quality of each age based on criteria established by Rodríguez-Rey et al. 1. Since the paper was published...

Biological invasions are responsible for substantial biodiversity declines as well as high economic losses to society and monetary expenditures associated with the management of these invasions1,2. The InvaCost database has enabled the generation of a reliable, comprehensive, standardized and easily updatable synthesis of the monetary costs of biol...

1. The regulation of river systems alters hydrodynamics and often reduces lateral connectivity between river channels and floodplains. For taxa such as frogs that rely on floodplain wetlands to complete their lifecycle, decreasing inundation frequency can reduce recruitment and increase the probability of local extinction. 2. We virtually reconstr...

Despite the low chance of a person being bitten by a shark, there are serious associated costs. Electronic deterrents are currently the only types of personal deterrent with empirical evidence of a substantial reduction in the probability of being bitten by a shark. We aimed to predict the number of people who could potentially avoid being bitten b...

Amphibian populations globally are in decline. One important threatening process is the abstraction of water resources for human use that continues to alter surface-water hydrology and reduce amphibian habitats. While conservation actions manipulating water to manage amphibians are frequently posited, empirical evidence is more difficult to locate....

The widespread activity of recreational hunting is proposed as a means of conserving nature and supporting livelihoods. However, recreational hunting-especially trophy hunting-has come under increasing scrutiny based on ethical concerns and the arguments that it can threaten species and fail to contribute meaningfully to local livelihoods. We provi...

Extinctions stemming from environmental change often trigger trophic cascades and coextinctions. However, it remains unclear whether trophic cascades were a large contributor to the megafauna extinctions that swept across several continents in the Late Pleistocene. The pathways to megafauna extinctions are particularly unclear for Sahul (landmass c...

Aim Climate change is redistributing species globally, resulting in altered community structures and ecosystem functioning. The current paradigm is that species should track temperature isoclines along latitudinal and depth gradients to remain within their thermal niches. However, the many exceptions to this rule point to complex ecological and env...

This R Shiny app (https://cjabradshaw.shinyapps.io/LeslieMatrixShiny/) projects a user-defined Leslie (age-classified) matrix to examine population changes through time. This fully customisable app includes a density-feedback function on survival relative to desired initial population size and carrying capacity, stochastic projections with user-def...

Ever wanted to collate the Altmetric data for your articles, but couldn't be bothered to do it manually? I've made the process substantially easier by designing this Shiny app (https://cjabradshaw.shinyapps.io/AltmetricShiny/). All you need to do is collate a list of 'digital object identifiers' ('doi') for the articles of interest, and the app d...

This R Shiny app (https://cjabradshaw.shinyapps.io/JournalRankShiny/) provides a κ-resampled composite journal rank incorporating six user-supplied citation indices There are many methods available to assess the relative citation performance of peer-reviewed journals. Regardless of their individual faults and advantages, citation-based metrics are...

Existing citation-based indices used to rank research performance do not permit a fair comparison of researchers among career stages or disciplines, nor do they treat women and men equally. We designed the ε-index, which is simple to calculate, based on open-access data, corrects for disciplinary variation, can be adjusted for career breaks, and se...

1. Climate change is altering the latitudinal distributions of species, with their capacity to keep pace with a shifting climate depending on the stochastic expression of population growth rates, and the influence of compensatory density feedback on age-specific survival rates. We use population-abundance time series at the leading edge of an expan...

The pursuit of simple, yet fair, unbiased, and objective measures of researcher performance has occupied bibliometricians and the research community as a whole for decades. However, despite the diversity of available metrics, most are either complex to calculate or not readily applied in the most common assessment exercises (e.g., grant assessment,...

The causes of Sahul’s megafauna extinctions remain uncertain, although multiple, interacting factors were likely responsible. To test hypotheses regarding plausible ecological mechanisms underlying these extinctions, we constructed the first stochastic, age-structured models for 13 extinct megafauna species from five functional/taxonomic groups, as...

Most conservation research and its applications tend to happen most frequently at reasonably fine spatial and temporal scales—for example, mesocosm experiments, single-species population viability analyses, recovery plans, patch-level restoration approaches, site-specific biodiversity surveys, et cetera. Yet, at the other end of the scale spectrum,...

The complexity of coral-reef ecosystems makes it challenging to predict their dynamics and resilience under future disturbance regimes. Models for coral-reef dynamics do not adequately account for the high functional diversity exhibited by corals. Models that are ecologically and mechanistically detailed are therefore required to simulate the ecolo...

The complexity of coral-reef ecosystems makes it challenging to predict their dynamics and resilience under future disturbance regimes. Models for coral-reef dynamics do not adequately account for the high functional diversity exhibited by corals. Models that are ecologically and mechanistically detailed are therefore required to simulate the ecolo...

The complexity of coral-reef ecosystems makes it challenging to predict their dynamics and resilience under future disturbance regimes. Models for coral-reef dynamics do not adequately account for the high functional diversity exhibited by corals. Models that are ecologically and mechanistically detailed are therefore required to simulate the ecolo...

Feral cats are one of the most destructive invasive predators worldwide. Due to the high risk of pushing native species to extinction in Australia, density-reduction or eradication campaigns can greatly improve the persistence probability and recovery of native fauna. Kangaroo Island — Australia’s third-largest island — was recently nominated as a...

Climate change is redistributing marine and terrestrial species globally. Life-history traits mediate the ability of species to cope with novel environmental conditions, and can be used to gauge the potential redistribution of taxa facing the challenges of a changing climate. However, it is unclear whether the same traits are important across diffe...

Background and aims: Development of the velamen radicum on the outer surface of the root epidermis is an important characteristic for water uptake and retention in some plant families, particularly in epiphytic orchids, for survival under water-limited environments. Velamen radicum cells derive from the primary root meristem, however, following th...

The complexity of coral-reef ecosystems makes it challenging to predict their dynamics and resilience under future disturbance regimes. Models for coral-reef dynamics do not adequately accounts for the high functional diversity exhibited by corals. Models that are ecologically and mechanistically detailed are therefore required to simulate the ecol...

Irreversible shifts of large-scale components of the Earth system (so-called ‘tipping elements’) on policy-relevant timescales are a major source of uncertainty for projecting the impacts of future climate change. The high latitudes are particularly vulnerable to positive feedbacks that amplify change through atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions. Unfo...

The distribution limits of many plants are dictated by environmental conditions and species’ functional traits. While many studies have evaluated how plant distribution is driven by environmental conditions, few have evaluated how key functional traits modify a plant’s response to environmental gradients. Here, we investigated the upper limits of d...

The mechanisms leading to megafauna ( >44 kg) extinctions in Late Pleistocene (126,000—12,000 years ago) Australia are highly contested because standard chronological analyses rely on scarce data of varying quality and ignore spatial complexity. Relevant archaeological and palaeontological records are most often also biased by differential preserva...

The 2016 version of the FosSahul database compiled non-human vertebrate megafauna fossil ages from Sahul published up to 2013 in a standardised format. Its purpose was to create a publicly available, centralized, and comprehensive database for palaeoecological investigations of the continent. Such databases require regular updates and improvements...

International trade in vulnerable marine species is regulated once they are listed in CITES Appendices (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora). Parties to the Convention submit proposal(s) 150 days prior to the CITES Conference for voting on the inclusion of new species in Appendices I and II, making a...

Objective We sought to test hypotheses regarding the principal correlates of child-health performance among African nations based on previous evidence collected at finer spatial scales. Design Retrospective, cross-sectional study. Setting All countries in Africa, excluding small-island nations. Primary and secondary outcome measures We defined a...

Socio-economic changes in Africa have increased pressure on the continent’s ecosystems. Most research investigating environmental change has focused on the changing status of specific species or communities and protected areas, but has largely neglected the broad-scale socio-economic conditions underlying environmental degradation. We tested nation...

The first peopling of Sahul (Australia, New Guinea and the Aru Islands joined at lower sea levels) by anatomically modern humans required multiple maritime crossings through Wallacea, with at least one approaching 100 km. Whether these crossings were accidental or intentional is unknown. Using coastal-viewshed analysis and ocean drift modelling com...

The koala’s (Phascolarctos cinereus) distribution is currently restricted to eastern and south-eastern Australia. However, fossil records dating from 70 ± 4 ka (ka = 103 years) from south-western Australia and the Nullarbor Plain are evidence of subpopulation extinctions in the southwest at least after the Last Interglacial (128-116 ka). We hypothe...

It is unequivocal that the poor condition of South Australia’s terrestrial biodiversity is continuing to decline overall – much like elsewhere in Australia. This decline is mainly due to the legacy of vegetation clearing and habitat modification since European colonisation, the destructive influence of invasive species (especially predators like ca...

It is unequivocal that the poor condition of South Australia’s terrestrial biodiversity is continuing to decline overall – much like elsewhere in Australia. This decline is mainly due to the legacy of vegetation clearing and habitat modification since European colonisation, the destructive influence of invasive species (especially predators like ca...

Most assessments of the effectiveness of river restoration are done at small spatial scales (<10 km) over short time frames (less than three years), potentially failing to capture large‐scale mechanisms such as completion of life‐history processes, changes to system productivity, or time lags of ecosystem responses. To test the hypothesis that popu...