Daniel Lunney

Climate change will have profound and unexpected impacts on biodiversity in the future. These impacts could potentially be mitigated through adaptive and responsive conservation planning, but it remains unclear how adaptation opportunities can be harnessed through careful planning of present‐day activities. Here, we show that the use of flexible co...

Private landholders play a critical role in global biodiversity conservation as they manage significant portions of land in many countries. Understanding the motivations and barriers related to landholders' uptake of formal conservation agreements, such as conservation covenants, is essential for scaling up and prioritizing investment in biodiversi...

Context The unprecedented scale and severity of the 2019–2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires in Australia were an environmental disaster, and koalas became the public face of the fires’ toll on wildlife. Aims We investigated the media stories on koalas during the fires to identify what was reported, and how the numbers of koalas killed by the fires were...

Effective private land conservation strategies that consider both landholder preferences and future climatic conditions are critical for preserving biodiversity and ecosystem services. Yet, the interaction and relative importance of these factors for conservation planning performance is unknown. Here, we assess the importance of considering landhol...

Genetic management is a critical component of threatened species conservation. Understanding spatial patterns of genetic diversity is essential for evaluating the resilience of fragmented populations to accelerating anthropogenic threats. Nowhere is this more relevant than on the Australian continent, which is experiencing an ongoing loss of biodiv...

Genetic management is a critical component of threatened species conservation. Understanding spatial patterns of genetic diversity is essential for evaluating the resilience of fragmented populations to accelerating anthropogenic threats. Nowhere is this more relevant than on the Australian continent, which is experiencing an ongoing loss of biodiv...

In line with the objectives of both the 2022 National Recovery Plan for the Koala Phascolarctos cinereus and 2022 NSW Koala Strategy, our study aimed to draw on the long-term records of koala rescue in NSW from 1973 to 2020 to describe trends in admissions across NSW. A total of 18,039 koala admission records were collated from 1973 to 2020. Koalas...

Catastrophic megafires can increase extinction risks; identifying species priorities for management and policy support is critical for preparing and responding to future fires. However, empirical data on population loss and recovery post-fire, especially megafire, are limited and taxonomically biased. These gaps could be bridged if species' morphol...

Conserving habitats crucial for threatened koala ( Phascolarctos cinereus ) populations requires rating habitat quality from a fine spatial scale to patches, landscapes and then regions. The koala has a specialized diet focused on the leaves of a suite of Eucalyptus species. We asked: what are the key regional influences on habitat selection by koa...

The 2021 annual forum of the Royal Zoological Society of NSW raked over the ashes of the unprecedented “Black Summer” bushfires of 2019–2020 in eastern and southern Australia to assess how forest ecosystems and their constituent fauna had fared. This paper provides an overview of the 21 studies that were presented at the forum, now as papers in thi...

Context Choosing the most effective combinations of actions to manage threatened species is difficult. Aims This study aimed to identify the most effective combinations of six management actions for reversing population declines of koala populations in three regional landscapes (Coastal, Riverine and Hinterland) in north-east New South Wales, Aust...

Managing the Grey-headed Flying-fox Pteropus poliocephalus as a species vulnerable to extinction in New South Wales (NSW) is complicated by contentious issues arising from flying-foxes feeding on commercial fruit and roosting in populated areas. Two decades on from their threatened species listing in 2001, there have been major developments in mana...

The Grey-headed Flying-fox Pteropus poliocephalus was listed as a vulnerable species by both the New South Wales (NSW) and Australian Governments in 2001. The NSW Government has since collaborated with other organisations and stakeholders on projects and initiatives for flying-fox conservation and population monitoring. While contentious issues for...

Koala rescue from the bushfires over the extended 2019–2020 fire season in NSW was a high-profile media topic over many months. We sought to determine how many fire-affected koalas were rescued and admitted to rehabilitation in NSW, what was the fate of these koalas, what parts of the state were involved, and how many other koalas entered rehabilit...

Context The koala is a threatened species in New South Wales and long-term datasets of koala rehabilitation provide a valuable source of insight into local threats. Aims To examine the long-term trends of the cause and fate of koalas admitted for rehabilitation to assist monitoring the recovery of koala populations and provide a new outlook on the...

Context Post-release monitoring of rehabilitated koalas is lacking, meaning that the long-term success rate is unknown. Aims We addressed the question: will a koala released from rehabilitation re-join the wild population and survive for months, if not years? Methods Using ear tag records as unique identifiers of individual koalas, we sifted the...

Aim After environmental disasters, species with large population losses may need urgent protection to prevent extinction and support recovery. Following the 2019–2020 Australian megafires, we estimated population losses and recovery in fire‐affected fauna, to inform conservation status assessments and management. Location Temperate and subtropical...

A challenge to understanding the impacts of roads on koalas is that their effects operate across multiple scales. To determine what conditions underlie koala roadkill, we looked at koala roadkill at two spatial scales – the entire state of NSW, and a local government area (Coffs Harbour) – for three road types (primary, arterial and local). We also...

This 6-year study aimed to monitor a local koala population and koala protection/mitigation measures before, during and after a major upgrade to the Pacific Highway at Lindsay’s cutting near Coffs Harbour in northern coastal New South Wales. This represents the scale of the individual koala interacting with traffic on a primary road within a well-s...

We used two survey methods-citizen science for private land and cameras for protected areas-to map the distribution of dingoes/wild dogs and foxes in NSW. Dingo/wild dog records were mostly confined to the east coast and ranges, with scattered locations in western NSW. This contrasts to the distribution of foxes, in which occupancy was high across...

The NESP Threatened Species Recovery Hub Project 8.4.5, Better managing fires and their impacts for koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) conservation, was a 6-month collaboration to develop a framework for fire management for koalas to ensure koala persistence and recovery in the fire prone landscape in which they occur. The project aimed to assist with...

Context Precise and accurate estimates of animal numbers are often essential for population and epidemiological models, as well as for guidance for population management and conservation. This is particularly true for threatened species in landscapes facing multiple threats. Estimates can be derived by different methods, but the question remains as...

We have been struck by the paucity of coverage of bats in the media, even though they constitute a quarter of the Australian mammal fauna. The Microchiroptera are almost invisible to the public, but the Megachiroptera come to public attention mostly when camping in or near towns or in orchards. There is a public blindness to the reality of bats, th...

Geographic citizen science has much potential to assist in wildlife research and conservation, but the quality of observation data is a key concern. We examined the effects of sampling design on the quality of spatial data collected for a koala citizen science project in Australia. Data were collected from three samples—volunteers (n = 454), an Int...

Effective wildlife conservation requires consideration of ecological and social factors, including social acceptability of conservation actions. Using the threatened koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) as a case study, we demonstrate a novel, socio-ecological approach for identifying conservation opportunity that spatially connects landscapes with commu...

The platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is one of the world's most evolutionarily distinct mammals, one of five extant species of egg-laying mammals, and the only living species within the family Ornithorhynchidae. Modern platypuses are endemic to eastern mainland Australia, Tasmania, and adjacent King Island, with a small introduced population on...

Land clearing for agriculture results in fragmented landscapes with diminished resources for wildlife. Habitat loss and fragmentation are widespread problems; however, their impacts are rarely assessed simultaneously at multiple spatial and temporal scales. We used a focal site, multiscale design to examine how landscape characteristics that affect...

The 2016 annual forum of the Royal Zoological Society of NSW was entitled: “The critical value of long-term field studies and datasets”. As Charley Krebs and co-authors comment in their paper, if there is one overall limitation on our ecological understanding, it is that our generalizations depend too much on short-term studies. All the authors in...

The aim of this paper is to highlight long-term (four decades) research and monitoring the populations of the four species of large kangaroos in New South Wales (NSW). Kangaroos are counted by aerial surveys using two types of aircraft: fixed-wing and helicopters. The NSW Commercial Kangaroo Harvest Management Plan 2017-21 states that harvest quota...

This essay is a zoologist’s response to Zoopolis.A political theory of animal rights by Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011). What drew me to look at their new approach was that geography played a part in conceptualising animal communities and, in particular, the specific focus on wild animals and urban wildlife. To oversimplify, Donaldson and Kymlicka sa...

Public participatory mapping is a method of crowdsourcing where the lay public can contribute spatial information for a range of applications including conservation planning. When used to collect wildlife observation data, participatory mapping becomes a type of "geographic citizen science" that involves collaboration with members of the public. Wh...

Scale matters when assessing population trends. Whereas traditional field-based ecological surveys are generally restricted to small temporal and spatial scales, community (citizen science) surveys allow wider consideration of population trends. We used repeat community surveys (completed in 2006 and 2015) to assess population change in koalas (Pha...

In the 1990s, the Pilliga forests were carrying the largest population of koalas west of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales (NSW). Whereas the NSW koala population in its entirety was thought to be in decline, the Pilliga population stood out as potentially increasing. By 2007, anecdotal evidence suggested that the population was in declin...

ABSTRACT Context Infectious diseases are important in the dynamics of wildlife populations, but there is limited understanding of how landscape change influences susceptibility to disease. Objectives We aimed to quantify the time-delayed influence of spatial and temporal components of landscape chaLandscape Ecologynge and climate variability on th...

To conserve all of our native fauna is a dangerous idea because it encompasses all the landscape, not just National Parks and Nature Reserves; all species, not just selected species such as charismatic vertebrates; it impacts on all decisions on the use of the land and the water and everything on it or in it. Acknowledging the conservation problem...

The task I am promoting in this paper is to expand the conservation and management focus from just threatened vertebrate species to include all non-threatened vertebrates. I reason that it is easily possible to do so because it lies within our long-standing legal and public interest in our native birds and mammals, and more recently, reptiles and f...

Dangerous ideas are those that challenge the status quo, ignore political correctness or, if followed, lead to an unsettling series of consequences (Pinker 2006). As practising zoologists, our ongoing concern relates to the long-term survival of our native wildlife across all land tenures and the marine environment, and protecting natural areas in...

Food is central to our existence. We are keen to know about it as we are vulnerable to its lack. Biodiversity is directly affected by the human need for food. Foley, in a lead paper in National Geographic, identifies that agriculture accelerates the loss of biodiversity and that agriculture is a major driver of wildlife extinction. In the increasin...

Our aim in this study is to provide the first ever quantitative, historical and map-based information of what fauna has been studied and recorded both outside and inside the protected areas of New South Wales (NSW), which are principally National Parks and Nature Reserves. Our objective was to consider the value of National Parks and Nature Reserve...

This paper a) gives an historical view of national parks and other protected areas since the 19th century, b) gives a history of national parks and nature reserves in NSW, c) shows how recent has been the recognition that fauna conservation depends upon protected areas, d) reflects how much has been achieved in the last 50 years, and e) considers w...

The Royal Zoological Society of NSW forum on the value of protected areas for fauna conservation, held in Sydney in November 2014, comprised a series of papers interlaced with a series of plenary discussions, which can be read in full in this theme edition of Australian Zoologist. The forum was a parallel event to the IUCN World Parks Congress on p...

Daylight saving time (DST) could reduce collisions with wildlife by changing the timing of commuter traffic relative to the behaviour of nocturnal animals. To test this idea, we tracked wild koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) in southeast Queensland, where koalas have declined by 80% in the last 20 years, and compared their movements with traffic patt...

In the early 1990s the koala became the mascot for a revegetation program to control salinity on agricultural land around Gunnedah in New South Wales, and a snapshot of the koala’s distribution in the shire was collected at that time, mainly via a mail survey. After the success of tree plantings in the 1990s, the koala population of the Liverpool P...

Scientists have traditionally collected data on whether a population is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same, but such studies are often limited by geographic scale and time frame. This means that for many species, understanding of trends comes from only part of their ranges at particular periods. Working with citizen scientists has the pote...

The increasing fragmentation of fire-prone forests of Australia has made the remaining populations of koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) more vulnerable to extinction. We examined the movement patterns of koalas in remnant forest of Port Stephens following a major wildfire. Each koala (n≤55) was monitored regularly by radio-tracking for up to 35 month...

Aim The koala is a widely distributed Australian marsupial with regional populations that are in rapid decline, are stable or have increased in size. This study examined whether it is possible to use expert elicitation to estimate abundance and trends of populations of this species. Diverse opinions exist about estimates of abundance and, consequen...

1. As threats to biodiversity from environmental change increase, assessing priorities for mitigation action becomes increasingly important. However, there have been few attempts to schedule actions across broad spatial extents that explicitly account for dynamic ecological processes and threats. 2. We combined a dynamic occupancy model with a deci...

In Private Native Forestry in New South Wales, species-specific provisions in the code of practice are triggered by the presence of koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), based on existing database records in the Atlas of NSW Wildlife. Whereas Species Distribution Modelling allows questions to be posed regarding the distribution of a species, and how it...

We examined a long-term, repeat dataset for the koala population within Coffs Harbour Local Government Area. Analyses of these data have led to the conclusion that, following a perceived population decline in the 1980s, the koala population of Coffs Harbour has endured between 1990 and 2011 and showed no evidence of a precipitous decline during thi...

Biodiversity benefits are routinely cited as an outcome of planting trees on farms but there has been too little information to properly substantiate such claims. This study is among the first to examine the use of plantings by arboreal mammals. We examined an important inland koala population and its use of farm revegetation to determine: (1) if k...

Context Reviews of climate change in Australia have identified that it is imposing additional stresses on biodiversity, which is already under threat from multiple human impacts. Aims The present study aimed to determine the contributions of several factors to the demise of the koala in the Eden region in south-eastern New South Wales and, in part...

Species, particularly foliovores, at the trailing edge of their geographical range are likely to be most vulnerable to climate change as they respond to physiological stress and the decline in the nutrient richness of their food source. We investigate the effect of environmental conditions on diet composition, resource use, and physiological stress...

Roads and vehicular traffic are among the most pervasive of threats to biodiversity because they fragmenting habitat, increasing mortality and opening up new areas for the exploitation of natural resources. However, the number of vehicles on roads is increasing rapidly and this is likely to continue into the future, putting increased pressure on wi...

Aim To understand climate and landscape drivers of species distributional shifts across broad spatial extents by integrating dynamic occupancy models with distribution data collected from the public. Location New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Methods We used data on koala ( Phascolarctos cinereus ) presence and absence collected across the state...

This paper aims to develop an ecological history of Royal National Park. The socio-cultural context for the push to reserve such a large tract of land in perpetuity in 1879 includes the Park's early links to the Royal Zoological Society of NSW (formerly the Acclimatisation Society of NSW), in addition to a strong political movement advocating the r...

When I analysed the diversity of (non-human) animal life in the abstracts from the Australian Animals Study Group conference in July 2013, I identified a concentration on large, well-known mammals, which from a zoological standpoint are a miniscule proportion of the world's animals, and even a highly skewed sample of mammals. It raises questions ab...

Wildlife roadkill is a tragic blind spot in public perception, both internationally and in Australia. Despite an increasing body of data documenting the frequency and distribution of roadkill, and its consequences for specific animal populations, scientists and engineers alone have been unable to develop solutions that challenge the prevailing indi...

AimClimate change is predicted to adversely affect wildlife populations at the trailing edge of their range, with extreme weather events acting as a catalyst for local extinctions and range contractions. We assessed the relative importance of long-term climate averages, short-term drought and habitat in predicting species occupancy and range edge,...

Recent research has shown that the ecology of stress has hitherto been neglected, but it is in fact an important influence on the distribution and numbers of wild vertebrates. Environmental changes have the potential to cause physiological stress that can affect population dynamics. Detailed information on the influence of environmental variables o...

The decisions that animals must make to achieve a balance between quantity and quality of resources become more difficult when their habitats are patchy and differ greatly in quality across space and time. Koalas are a prime subject to study this problem because they have a specialised diet of eucalypt leaves and need to balance nutrient and water...

Conservation strategies derived from research carried out in one part of the range of a widely distributed species and then uniformly applied over multiple regions risk being ineffective due to regional variations in species-habitat relationships. This is particularly true at the edge of the range where information on animal movements and resource...

Context Habitat thresholds are the critical point(s), below which the probability of occurrence of a species declines. Identifying thresholds assists land managers to decide how much habitat is needed to conserve a species. However, for any given species, a threshold may not exist, or might occur at one scale but not at others, and it may differ ac...

Environmental changes result in physiological responses of organisms, which can adversely affect population dynamics and reduce resistance to disease. These changes are expressed in chronic levels of stress. Measuring glucocorticoid (GC) concentration in faeces is a non-invasive method for monitoring stress in wildlife. Metabolism and excretion of...

Wildlife research; climate change; animal ethics; science policy; journal impact factors; Australian fauna; ecological conscience; biodiversity crisis; extinction, taxonomists, museums

Abstract The conservation of any species requires understanding and predicting the distribution of its habitat and resource use, including the effects of scale-dependent variation in habitat and resource quality. Consequently, testing for resource selection at the appropriate scales is critical.We investigated how the resource selection process var...

Habitat loss and natural catastrophes reduce the resources available to animals. Species can persist if they have access to additional resources and habitats through the processes of landscape complementation and supplementation. In arid and semi-arid ecosystems, where productivity is limited by precipitation, the impact of landscape change and pro...

Global Positioning System (GPS) wildlife telemetry collars are being used increasingly to understand the movement patterns of wild mammals. However, there are few published studies on which to gauge their general utility and success. This paper highlights issues faced by some of the first researchers to use GPS technology for terrestrial mammal tra...

The conservation of any species requires understanding and predicting the distribution of its habitat and resource use, including the effects of scale-dependent variation in habitat and resource quality. Consequently, testing for resource selection at the appropriate scales is critical.We investigated how the resource selection process varies acros...

Human-induced landscape change associated with habitat loss and fragmentation places wildlife populations at risk. One issue in these landscapes is a change in the prevalence of disease which may result in increased mortality and reduced fecundity. Our understanding of the influence of habitat loss and fragmentation on the prevalence of wildlife di...

How people coexist and interact with animals has become an intensely debated issue in recent times, particularly with the rise of the animal protection movement following the publication of Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation in 1975. This paper discusses some shortcomings of the philosophical positions taken in this complex debate. Singer has he...