Damien A Fordham

• PhD: Conservation Biology
• Associate Professor Global Change Ecology at The University of Adelaide

The spatiotemporal response of species to past global change must be understood for adaptive management and to make useful predictions. Characteristics of past population dynamics are imprinted in genes, yet these molecular 'log books' are just beginning to be used to improve forecasts of biotic responses to climate change. This is despite there no...

Ecological niche models (ENMs) are the primary tool used to describe and forecast the potential influence of climate change on biodiversity. However, ENMs do not directly account for important biological and landscape processes likely to affect range dynamics at a variety of spatial scales. Recent advances to link ENMs with population models have f...

Uses of long-term ecological proxies in strategies for mitigating future biodiversity loss are too limited in scope. Recent advances in geochronological dating, palaeoclimate reconstructions and molecular techniques for inferring population dynamics offer exciting new prospects for using retrospective knowledge to better forecast and manage ecologi...

The current distribution of species, environmental conditions and their interactions represent only one snapshot of a planet that is continuously changing, in part due to human influences. To distinguish human impacts from natural factors, the magnitude and pace of climate shifts since the Last Glacial Maximum are often used to determine whether pa...

Criticism has been levelled at climate-change-induced forecasts of species range shifts that do not account explicitly for complex population dynamics. The relative importance of such dynamics under climate change is, however, undetermined because direct tests comparing the performance of demographic models vs. simpler ecological niche models are s...

Motivation Timing, duration and severity of marine heatwaves are changing rapidly in response to anthropogenic climate change, thereby increasing the frequency of coral bleaching events. Mass coral bleaching events result from cumulative heat stress, which is commonly quantified through degree heating weeks (DHW). Here we introduce CoralBleachRisk...

Accurately predicting the vulnerabilities of species to climate change requires a more detailed understanding of the functional and life-history traits that make some species more susceptible to declines and extinctions in shifting climates. This is because existing trait-based correlates of extinction risk from climate and environmental disturbanc...

Human settlement of islands across the Pacific Ocean was followed by waves of faunal extinctions that occurred so rapidly that their dynamics are difficult to reconstruct in space and time. These extinctions included large, wingless birds called moa that were endemic to New Zealand. Here we reconstructed the range and extinction dynamics of six gen...

Spatial and temporal patterns of future coral bleaching are uncertain, hampering global conservation efforts to protect coral reefs against climate change. Our analysis of daily projections of ocean warming establishes the severity, annual duration, and onset of severe bleaching risk for global coral reefs this century, pinpointing vital climatic r...

The extinction of the woolly rhinoceros ( Coelodonta antiquitatis ) at the onset of the Holocene remains an enigma, with conflicting evidence regarding its cause and spatiotemporal dynamics. This partly reflects challenges in determining demographic responses of late Quaternary megafauna to climatic and anthropogenic causal drivers with available g...

Timing, duration, and severity of marine heatwaves are changing rapidly in response to anthropogenic climate change, thereby increasing the frequency of coral bleaching events. Mass coral bleaching events occur because of cumulative heat stress, which is commonly quantified through Degree Heating Weeks (DHW). Here we introduce CoralBleachRisk , a d...

The bowhead whale, an Arctic endemic, was heavily overexploited during commercial whaling between the 16th-20th centuries. Current climate warming, with Arctic amplification of average global temperatures, poses a new threat to the species. Assessing the vulnerability of bowhead whales to near-future predictions of climate change remains challengin...

Drivers and dynamics of initial human migrations across individual islands and archipelagos are poorly understood, hampering assessments of subsequent modification of island biodiversity. We developed and tested a new statistical-simulation approach for reconstructing the pattern and pace of human migration across islands at high spatiotemporal res...

European bison (Bison bonasus) were widespread throughout Europe during the late Pleistocene. However, the contributions of environmental change and humans to their near extinction have never been resolved. Using process-explicit models, fossils and ancient DNA, we disentangle the combinations of threatening processes that drove population declines...

The Arctic is among the most climatically sensitive environments on Earth, and the disappearance of multiyear sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is predicted within decades. As apex predators, polar bears are sentinel species for addressing the impact of environmental variability on Arctic marine ecosystems. By integrating genomics, isotopic analysis, mor...

An emerging research program on population and geographic range dynamics of Australia's mammals illustrates an approach to better understand and respond to geographic range collapses of threatened wildlife in general. In 1788, Europeans colonized an Australia with a diverse and largely endemic mammal fauna, where many species that are now extinct o...

Aim: The drivers and dynamics of initial human migrations across individual islands and archipelagos are poorly understood, affecting assessments of human-modification of island biodiversity. Here, we describe and test a process-explicit approach for reconstructing human arrival and expansion on islands, which combines archaeological and climate re...

Reconstructions of the spatiotemporal dynamics of human dispersal away from evolutionary origins in Africa are important for determining the ecological consequences of the arrival of anatomically modern humans in naïve landscapes and interpreting inferences from ancient genomes on indigenous population history. While efforts have been made to indep...

Aim To determine the ecological processes and drivers of range collapse, population decline and eventual extinction of the steppe bison in Eurasia. Location Siberia. Time period Pleistocene and Holocene. Major taxa studied Steppe bison (Bison priscus). Methods We configured 110,000 spatially explicit population models (SEPMs) of climate–human–s...

The Arctic is among the most climatically sensitive environments on Earth, and the disappearance of multiyear sea-ice in the Arctic Ocean is predicted within decades. As apex predators, polar bears are sentinel species for addressing the impact of environmental variability on Arctic marine ecosystems. By integrating genomics, isotopic analysis, mor...

The sustainability of coral reef fisheries is jeopardized by complex and interacting socio-ecological stressors that undermine their contribution to food and nutrition security. Climate change has emerged as one of the key stressors threatening coral reefs and their fish-associated services. How fish nutrient concentrations respond to warming ocean...

Processes leading to range contractions and population declines of Arctic megafauna during the late Pleistocene and early‐Holocene are uncertain, with intense debate on the roles of human hunting, climatic change, and their synergy. Obstacles to a resolution, have included an over reliance on correlative rather than process‐explicit approaches for...

With ever-growing data availability and computational power at our disposal, we now have the capacity to use process-explicit models more widely to reveal the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms responsible for spatiotemporal patterns of biodiversity. Most research questions focused on the distribution of diversity cannot be answered experimenta...

The vulnerability of marine biodiversity to accelerated rates of climatic change is poorly understood. By developing a new method for identifying extreme oceanic warming events during Earth’s most recent deglaciation, and comparing these to 21st century projections, we show that future rates of ocean warming will disproportionately affect the most...

The cover image is based on the Letter Process‐explicit models reveal pathway to extinction for woolly mammoth using pattern‐oriented validation by Damien A. Fordham et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13911. Image Credit: Mauricio Anton.

The nine currently recognized species of moa (Order – Dinornithiformes; Bonaparte 1853) suffered extinction soon after New Zealand was settled by humans. They were the result of an evolutionary radiation that produced a unique guild of birds – giant, and totally wingless species that evolved in the absence of non-volant mammals. Recent advances in...

Pathways to extinction start long before the death of the last individual. However, causes of early stage population declines and the susceptibility of small residual populations to extirpation are typically studied in isolation. Using validated process-explicit models, we disentangle the ecological mechanisms and threats that were integral in the...

Spatially explicit population models (SEPMs) can simulate spatiotemporal changes in species' range dynamics in response to variation in climatic and environmental conditions, and anthropogenic activities. When combined with pattern‐oriented modelling methods, ecological processes and drivers of range shifts and extinctions can be identified, and pl...

Processes leading to the megafauna extinctions of the late Pleistocene and early-Holocene are uncertain, with intense debate on the roles of human hunting and climatic change. Using process-explicit simulations of climate-human-woolly mammoth interactions, which integrate spatiotemporal evidence from fossils and ancient DNA, we show that humans acc...

Paleoclimatic data are used in eco-evolutionary models to improve knowledge of biogeographical processes that drive patterns of biodiversity through time, opening windows into past climate–biodiversity dynamics. Applying these models to harmonised simulations of past and future climatic change can strengthen forecasts of biodiversity change. Stable...

The Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) is an endangered, island-endemic species with a naturally restricted distribution. Despite this, no previous studies have attempted to predict the effects of climate change on this iconic species. We used extensive Komodo dragon monitoring data, climate, and sea-level change projections to build spatially exp...

Using the past to inform the future The late Quaternary paleorecord, within the past ∼130,000 years, can help to inform present-day management of the Earth's ecosystems and biota under climate change. Fordham et al. review when and where rapid climate transitions can be found in the paleoclimate record. They show how such events in Earth's history...

Knowledge of global patterns of biodiversity, ranging from intraspecific genetic diversity (GD) to taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity, is essential for identifying and conserving the processes that shape the distribution of life. Yet, global patterns of GD and its drivers remain elusive. Here we assess existing biodiversity theories to explain an...

The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is a notorious economic and environmental pest species in its invasive range. To better understand the population and range dynamics of this species, 41 yr of abundance data have been collected from 116 unique sites across a broad range of climatic and environmental conditions in Australia. We analyzed th...

Climate stability leads to high levels of speciation and reduced extinction rates, shaping species richness patterns1–3. Hotspots of species diversity often overlap with regions that experienced stable temperatures and, perhaps, variable rates of precipitation during the late Quaternary4,5. These hotspots potentially harbour many species with low v...

Climate-model-based paleoclimatic time-series data are being used increasingly in ecological and evolutionary models to improve our understanding of the biogeographical processes that drive patterns of biodiversity across time. When models calibrated in past are driven by simulations of future climate change, the subsequent results can strengthen d...

In its invasive range in Australia, the European rabbit threatens the persistence of native flora and fauna and damages agricultural production. Understanding its distribution and ecological niche is critical for developing management plans to reduce populations and avoid further biodiversity and economic losses. We developed an ensemble of species...

With ongoing introductions into Australia since the 1700s, the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) has become one of the most widely distributed and abundant vertebrate pests, adversely impacting Australia's biodiversity and agroeconomy. To understand the population and range dynamics of the species and its impacts better, occurrence and abunda...

The stability of regional climates on millennial timescales is theorised to be a primary determinant of nearby diversification [1–5]. Using simulated patterns of past temperature change at monthly timescales [6], we show that the locations of climatically stable regions are likely to have varied considerably across and within millennia during glaci...

Aim: The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is a notorious economic and environmental pest species in its invasive range. To better understand the population and range dynamics of this species, long-term abundance data has been collected across a broad range of climatic and environmental condition in Australia. We analysed this time series dat...

In the face of increasing cumulative effects from human and natural disturbances, sustaining coral reefs will require a deeper understanding of the drivers of coral resilience in space and time. Here we develop a high‐resolution, spatially explicit model of coral dynamics on Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Our model accounts for biological, e...

Loss of dispersal typifies island biotas, but the selective processes driving this phenomenon remain contentious. This is because selection via, both indirect (e.g. relaxed selection or island syndromes) and direct (e.g. natural selection or spatial sorting) processes may be involved, and no study has yet convincingly distinguished between these al...

Aim Understanding the relative importance of climatic and non‐climatic distribution drivers for co‐occurring, functionally similar species is required to assess potential consequences of climate change. This understanding is, however, lacking for most ecosystems. We address this knowledge gap and forecast changes in distribution for habitat‐forming...

How individual species and entire ecosystems will respond to future climate change are among the most pressing questions facing ecologists. Past biodiversity dynamics recorded in the paleoecological archives show a broad array of responses, yet significant knowledge gaps remain. In particular, the relative roles of evolutionary adaptation, phenotyp...

1. European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) have been exposed to rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) and myxoma virus (MYXV) in their native and invasive ranges for decades. Yet, the long-term effects of these viruses on rabbit population dynamics remain poorly understood. 2. In this context, we analysed 17 years of detailed capture–mark–recap...

Abundant and widely distributed invasive prey can negatively affect co‐occurring native species by competing for food and/or shelter, removing vegetation cover and reducing habitat complexity (changing predation risk), and by sustaining elevated abundances of invasive mesopredators. However, information regarding the community and trophic consequen...

Here I present a possible ’worst-case’ outcome of climate change. The basic premise is that complete failure of one, or more, consecutive years led to a rapid loss of wetlands, with the smallest wetlands most likely to be affected. In our research we asked what the consequences of such a systematic loss of small to large wetlands would mean for the...

Transects that traverse substantial climate gradients are important tools for climate change research and allow questions on the extent to which phenotypic variation associates with climate, the link between climate and species distributions, and variation in sensitivity to climate change among biomes to be addressed. However, the potential limitat...

Transects that traverse substantial climate gradients are important tools for climate change research and allow questions on the extent to which phenotypic variation associates with climate, the link between climate and species distributions, and variation in sensitivity to climate change among biomes to be addressed. However, the potential limitat...

Questions Within a meta‐community, what determines how local species composition differs from the regional community? How do local conditions and landscape context affect this differentiation in wetland vegetation? Location Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia. Methods We sampled native vegetation across 26 hydrological gradients in a wetland meta...

It has been difficult to access projections of global-scale climate change with high temporal resolution spaning the late Pleistocene and Holocene. This has limited our ability to discern how climate fluctuations have affected species’ range dynamics and extinction processes, turn-over in ecological communities and changes in genetic diversity. Pal...

Quantifying the risk of extinction due to habitat loss is an increasingly urgent task for the design and implementation of effective conservation interventions. Methods based on species- and endemics-area relationships are well developed, but applications to date have concentrated primarily on the fragmentation of formerly continuous habitats such...

The effect of twenty-first-century climate change on biodiversity is commonly forecast based on modelled shifts in species ranges, linked to habitat suitability. These projections have been coupled with species-area relationships (SAR) to infer extinction rates indirectly as a result of the loss of climatically suitable areas and associated habitat...

The two living species of bison (European and American) are among the few terrestrial megafauna to have survived the late Pleistocene extinctions. Despite the extensive bovid fossil record in Eurasia, the evolutionary history of the European bison (or wisent, Bison bonasus) before the Holocene (o11.7 thousand years ago (kya)) remains a mystery. We...

Sample details

Supplementary Figures 1-27, Supplementary Tables 1-11, Supplementary Notes 1-4 and Supplementary References

BEAST input file

Nuclear SNPs

MrBayes output tree

Appendix S1. Primer sequences and reference for primers used in this study. Appendix S2. Museum and location data for samples used in this study. Appendix S3. Additional phylogenetic results including mismatch distributions and AMOVA comparisons.

The distribution of antilopine wallaroo, Macropus antilopinus, is marked by a break in the species’ range between Queensland and the Northern Territory, coinciding with the Carpentarian barrier. Previous work on M. antilopinus revealed limited genetic differentiation between the Northern Territory and Queensland M. antilopinus populations across th...

Spatially explicit demographic models are increasingly being used to forecast the effect of global change on the range dynamics of species. These models are typically complex, with the structure and parameter values often estimated with considerable uncertainty. If not properly accounted, this can lead to bias or false precision in projections of c...

1. Trophic cascade theory predicts that apex predators structure ecosystems by regulating mesopredator and herbivore abundance and behaviour. Studies on trophic cascades have typically focused on short linear chains of species interactions. A framework that integrates more realistic and complex interactions is needed to make broader predictions on...

Biological invasions are not only a major threat to biodiversity, they also have major impacts on local economies and agricultural production systems. Once established, the connection of local populations into metapopulation networks facilitates dispersal at landscape scales, generating spatial dynamics that can impact the outcome of pest-managemen...

Effects of general population reduction on model metapopulations with low dispersal and intermediate management level. Relative change in maximum abundance is plotted against management extent (e) for different values of spatial management strategy (s). Dispersal (d) and management level (l) are constant (d = 0.1 and l = 0.6). Lines are a local pol...

Effects of general population reduction of rabbits on real metapopulations for different spatial management strategies. Change in the maximum population abundance is plotted against the spatial extent of management (e) for different spatial management strategies (s), with dispersal (d) = 0.6 and management level (l) = 0.9. Lines are a local polynom...

Effects of decrease in local carrying capacity on real-world metapopulations for different spatial management strategies. Change in the maximum population abundance is plotted against the spatial extent of management (e) for different spatial management strategies (s), with dispersal (d) = 0.3 and management level (l) = 0.6. Lines are a local polyn...

Turretfield (South Australia) sample site time series of rabbit population abundances. Parameters values for the demographic model used in this study were estimated from this time series (see main text). (CSV)

Source code for the software implementation of the metapopulation model proposed. The archive includes source code, readme file explaining how to run it, and the input files necessary to run the simulations. (ZIP)

Effects of general population reduction on model metapopulations with high dispersal and management level. Change in maximum abundance is plotted against management extent (e) for different values of spatial management strategy (s). Dispersal (d) and management level (l) are constant (d = 0.6 and l = 0.9). Lines are a local polynomial regression fi...

Relative influence of predictor variables describing management scenarios on the fraction of surviving populations. Plots in A and B show the relative importance of the explanatory variables dispersal (d), management extent (e), management level (l), and spatial management strategy (s), for the two management actions studied: general population red...

Relative influence of predictor variables describing management scenarios on coefficient of variation of population-scale abundances. Plots in A and B show the relative importance of the explanatory variables dispersal (d), management extent (e), management level (l), and spatial management strategy (s), for the management actions studied: general...

The reproduction of many species is determined by seasonally-driven resource supply. But it is difficult to quantify whether the fecundity is sensitive to short- or long-term exposure to environmental conditions such as rainfall that drive resource supply. Using 25 years of data on individual fecundity of European female rabbits, Oryctolagus cunicu...

In cleared landscapes, wetlands can represent important reservoirs of native plant diversity, which include terrestrial species. Depending on study aims, non-wetland plants might be removed before analysis, affecting conclusions around biodiversity and community structure. We compared the native plant communities of seasonal wetlands in a predomina...

The effectiveness of invasive species control can be influenced by seasonal fluctuations in reproduction in response to environmental conditions. However, it is difficult to determine how demography and environmental conditions affect the efficacy of different control efforts from field trials alone. We incorporated an ontogenetic growth model into...

Fossils represent invaluable data to reconstruct the past history of life, yet they are often rare and difficult to find. The traditional fossil-hunting approach focuses on small areas and has not yet taken advantage of modelling techniques commonly used in ecology to account for an organism’s past distributions. We propose a new method to assist f...

Maps of the suitability for fossil preservation (a) and discovery (b). Fossil-preservation suitability is a function of the presence of caves and the cover of lakes and suitable rocks per grid cell. Fossil-discovery suitability, corrected for sampling bias, is a function of erosion proxies: mean rain intensity, mean slope, and cover of bare soil pe...

Maps of the overlap of suitability areas predicted by climate-envelope, preservation and discovery models for Diprotodon, Zygomaturus, Protemnodon, Thylacoleo, and Genyornis. These areas are the result of converting the continuous output into binary (presence/absence), using a threshold that maximised the true skill statistic. Hence, if a grid cell...

Climate envelopes of Genyornis newtoni and Dromaius novaehollandiae. (a) Comparison of climate-envelope dynamics at 56, 46, 34 and 32 ka ago. Circles show fossil locations for each species and darker reds represent higher climatic suitabilities. (b) Overlap of climate-envelopes of both species. (PDF)

Maps of variables used in the fossil-discovery model. We used maps of slope across Australia (a), bare soil (c) and rain intensity (annual rainfall divided by annual days of rain, e) and calculated their values in each grid cell (b,d,f). Areas of steep slope are represented by white in ‘a’ and by dark reds in ‘b’. Areas of bare soil are shown in re...

Description of methods used to model climate envelopes. (PDF)

Generalised linear models ranked by information criterion. (PDF)

Spatial (a) and temporal (b) distribution of fossils used to train and validate climate-envelope models for Diprotodon, Zygomaturus, Protemnodon, Thylacoleo, and Genyornis. For model training, we used only fossils with reliable ages (black circles and red grid cells in a)[14]. For validation, we used grid cells that had only unreliably dated fossil...

Map of fossil sites (a) and density of fossils per grid cell (b). (PDF)