Deborah Sheena Bower

• BSc. Ph.D.
• Senior Lecturer at University of New England

Climate change and human activity are changing the characteristics of freshwater systems all over the world. Water quality is an important environmental variable to turtles, and many species have limited tolerances to different abiotic parameters. Despite the potential for extreme effects of water quality variables on turtle physiology and behaviou...

Anthropogenic landscape change due to urbanization, agriculture, and resource extraction results in barriers within the landscape. Artificial structures such as roads, fences, levees, and dams limit the movement of some species and further fragment residual habitat. In this study, we investigated the ability of Eastern long‐necked turtles (Chelodin...

We review and provide updated recommendations for amphibian surveys and monitoring.

Fences disturb the movements of terrestrial species, altering migration patterns, limiting access to vital resources, and reducing genetic diversity. With almost 40% of the Earth's land surface converted for agriculture, farm fencing to protect crops and corral livestock is expected to stretch into the millions of kilometers. As semi‐terrestrial ec...

A practical guide to assist landholders and land managers in selecting turtle-friendly fences.

As the most threatened vertebrate class on earth, amphibians are at the forefront of the biodiversity crisis, with the recognition of global amphibian declines and extinctions dating back several decades now. The current Amphibian Conservation Action Plan is adopting two strategies to address the goal of the amelioration of the amphibian crisis: th...

Continued amphibian species and population declines have led to the prioritisation of ex situ conservation breeding programme (CBPs) as one of the major strategies to safeguard and mitigate amphibian extinction. In the original version of the Amphibian Conservation Action Plan (ACAP), assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) were incorporated as a...

Frozen water bodies provide a physiological challenge to fauna by physically limiting access to atmospheric oxygen. To tolerate low temperatures, reptiles use brumation as a physiological strategy in winter. Cryptodira vary in their tolerance to freezing conditions but the extent of tolerance in pleurodirans is largely unknown. Australia's freshwat...

Context The increasing number and length of droughts is a threat for many freshwater turtle populations. Aims Our study investigated the movement and survival of Emydura macquarii, Chelodina expansa and Chelodina longicollis in drought and flood conditions. Methods Turtles were captured in the Gwydir Wetland, New South Wales, Australia. We assess...

Australian freshwater turtle populations have declined substantially, with consequent losses to aquatic ecosystem functions. A leading hypothesis is that turtles have declined through lost recruitment caused by high nest predation by invasive foxes. The ‘fox hypothesis’ is supported by experiments showing that nest predation rates exceed 95% in man...

Urban planning which enhances native biodiversity in and around cities is needed to address the impacts of urbanisation and conserve urban biodiversity. The “Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design” (BSUD) framework incorporates ecological knowledge into urban planning to achieve positive biodiversity outcomes through improved urban design and infrastr...

Anthropogenic landscape change due to urbanisation, agriculture and resource extraction inevitably results in linear barriers within the landscape. Artificial linear structures such as roads, fences, levees, and dams limit the movement of some species and further fragment residual habitat. In this study, we investigated the ability of Eastern long-...

Vocal communication is critical to a wide range of vertebrates, and its disruption may reduce fitness. Anuran males call to attract females, and the calls of invasive species may interfere with communication by reducing signaling efficacy. To investigate the effects of soundscape invasion on native species, we played invasive Cane Toad (Rhinella ma...

Genetic mutations resulting in abnormal colouration occur across all vertebrate groups but are considered rare, especially in mammals. Hypo-pigmentary conditions can be separated into albinism, leucism and piebaldism. The impact of colour variation on an animal’s risk of predation and its ability to blend with its surroundings is widely recognised....

Cooper Creek is one of Australia's largest unregulated river systems and one of the world's most variable large river systems. It is a dynamic environment that oscillates between booms and busts; yet, many species thrive in it. One of these species, the Cooper Creek turtle (Emydura macquarii emmotti) has received little attention, despite being one...

The Australian freshwater turtle fauna is dominated by species in the family Chelidae. The extant fauna comprises a series of distinct lineages, each of considerable antiquity, relicts of a more extensive and perhaps diverse fauna that existed when wetter climes prevailed. Several phylogenetically distinctive species are restricted to single, often...

Australia's freshwater turtles have high endemicity and many are threatened by extinction. Following a symposium held at the 2022 conference of the Australian Society of Herpetologists, we summarized the current status of research and conservation for Australian freshwater turtles and identified opportunities for future research. Eight species (32%...

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...

Ectotherm body temperatures fluctuate with environmental variability and host behavior, which may influence host-pathogen interactions. Fungal pathogens are a major threat to ectotherms and may be highly responsive to the fluctuating thermal profiles of individual hosts, especially cool-loving fungi exposed to high host temperatures. However, most...

Globally, river regulation has degraded wetlands, including parts of the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), an ecologically significant basin in Australia. Frogs in a floodplain environment largely depend on habitats created by river flows, but little is known about how frogs in the northern MDB are impacted by river regulation. We tested how wetland inun...

Identifying hotspots of biological diversity is a key step in conservation prioritisation. Melanesia—centred on the vast island of New Guinea—is increasingly recognised for its exceptionally species-rich and endemic biota. Here we show that Melanesia has the world’s most diverse insular amphibian fauna, with over 7% of recognised global frog specie...

Globally, river regulation has degraded wetlands, and continues to threaten wetland dependent biota including parts of the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), an ecologically significant drainage basin in Australia. Frogs in floodplain wetlands largely depend on habitats created by river flows but little is known about how frog chorusing activities, a meas...

Emerging infectious diseases are a serious threat to wildlife populations, and there is growing evidence that host microbiomes play important roles in infection dynamics, possibly even mitigating diseases. Nevertheless, most research on this topic has focused only on bacterial microbiomes, while fungal microbiomes have been largely neglected. To he...

Artificial incubation of eggs for the mass release of hatchlings is a common conservation intervention for imperilled turtle species. Programs designed to reinforce wild populations need to ensure that they are releasing appropriate male to female ratios into the wild. In many turtle species, the sex of juveniles cannot be identified using external...

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...

The amphibian chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) causes the disease chytridiomycosis, which is a primary driver for amphibian population declines and extinctions worldwide. For highly susceptible species, such as the green and golden bell frog Litoria aurea, large numbers of Bd-related mortalities are thought to occur during the col...

More than a third of the world’s amphibian species are listed as Threatened or Extinct, with a recent assessment identifying 45 Australian frogs (18.4% of the currently recognised species) as ‘Threatened’ based on IUCN criteria. We applied structured expert elicitation to 26 frogs assessed as Critically Endangered and Endangered to estimate their p...

Abstract Emerging infectious diseases threaten the persistence of biodiversity globally. The amphibian chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, is one of the most widespread and damaging pathogens to biodiversity. New Guinea hosts 6% of the world's frogs and is the largest landmass where B. dendrobatidis remains undetected despite being larg...

Emerging infectious diseases can cause dramatic declines in wildlife populations. Sometimes, these declines are followed by recovery, but many populations do not recover. Studying differential recovery patterns may yield important information for managing disease-afflicted populations and facilitating population recoveries. In the late 1980s, a chy...

Macrofungi are an important food source for many mammals, birds and arthropods; in return, these animals disperse numerous species of fungi through their scats. Many of the fungi that are important as food also perform key functions in the ecosystem through nutrient cycling. Research on associations between reptiles and fungi has primarily focused...

Initial research on the spread of cane toads (Rhinella marina) through tropical Australia reported a high incidence of spinal arthritis (spondylosis) in toads at the invasion front (where toads disperse rapidly), but not in areas colonized earlier (where toads are more sedentary). The idea that spondylosis was a cost of rapid dispersal was challeng...

The amphibian chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (chytrid) has caused the most widespread, disease‐induced declines and extinctions in vertebrates recorded to date. The largest climatically suitable landmass that may still be free of this fungus is New Guinea. The island is home to a sizeable proportion of the world's known frog species...

Contamination is a ubiquitous problem in microbiome research and can skew results, especially when small amounts of target DNA are available. Nevertheless, no clear solution has emerged for removing microbial contamination. To address this problem, we developed the R package microDecon (https://github.com/donaldtmcknight/microDecon), which uses the...

Recent decades have seen the emergence and spread of numerous infectious diseases, often with severe negative consequences for wildlife populations. Nevertheless, many populations survive the initial outbreaks, and even undergo recoveries. Unfortunately, the long‐term effects of these outbreaks on host population genetics are poorly understood; to...

The amphibian chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis is an emerging infectious pathogen present on every continent except Antarctica. It causes the disease chytridiomycosis in a subset of species but does not always result in disease or death for every host. Ambient temperature influences both amphibian metabolism and chytrid pathogenicity,...

A great diversity of parasites, from viruses and bacteria to a range of remarkable eukaryotic organisms, exploit reptile and amphibian hosts. Recent increases in the emergence of infectious disease have revealed the importance of understanding the effects of interactions between hosts and their parasites. Here we review the effects of parasite infe...

Microbiome sequencing data often need to be normalized due to differences in read depths, and recommendations for microbiome analyses generally warn against using proportions or rarefying to normalize data and instead advocate alternatives, such as upper quartile, CSS , edgeR‐ TMM , or DES eq‐ VS . Those recommendations are, however, based on studi...

Loss of fitness can be a consequence of selection for rapid dispersal ability in invasive species. Increased prevalence of spinal arthritis may occur in cane toad populations at the invasion front as a cost of increased invasiveness, but our knowledge of the ecological drivers of this condition is lacking. We aimed to determine the factors explaini...

The projected rise in global mean sea levels places many freshwater turtle species at risk of saltwater intrusion into freshwater habitats. Freshwater turtles are disproportionately more threatened than other taxa; thus, understanding the role of salinity in determining their contemporary distribution and evolution should be a research priority. Fr...

Emerging infectious diseases threaten the survival of many species and populations by causing large declines and altering life history traits and population demographics. Therefore, it is imperative to understand how diseases impact wildlife populations so that effective management strategies can be planned. Many studies have focused on understandi...

Unprecedented global climate change and increasing rates of infectious disease emergence are occurring simultaneously. Infection with emerging pathogens may alter the thermal thresholds of hosts. However, the effects of fungal infection on host thermal limits have not been examined. Moreover, the influence of infections on the heat tolerance of hos...

Temperature variability, and in particular temperature decreases, can increase susceptibility of amphibians to infections by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). However, the effects of temperature shifts on the immune systems of Bd-infected amphibians are unresolved. We acclimated frogs to 16 °C and 26 °C (baseline), simultaneously tran...

Preemptive policies can protect amphibians from devastating fungal diseases

Recent emergences of fungal diseases have caused catastrophic global losses of biodiversity. Temperature is one of the most important factors influencing host–fungus associations but the effects of temperature variability on disease development are rarely examined. The chytrid pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) has had severe effects on p...

en Bayesian network analyses can be used to interactively change the strength of effect of variables in a model to explore complex relationships in new ways. In doing so, they allow one to identify influential nodes that are not well studied empirically so that future research can be prioritized. We identified relationships in host and pathogen bio...

For pond-breeding species, the distribution of larvae is a reflection of habitat suitability and adult breeding site selection. Some species preferentially breed in ephemeral ponds, which can provide benefits for larvae. An alternative strategy used by adults to increase offspring survival is to detect aquatic predators and avoid them when selectin...

Freshwater biota experience physiological challenges in regions affected by salinization, but often the effects on particular species are poorly understood. Freshwater turtles are of particular concern as they appear to have limited ability to cope with environmental conditions that are hyperosmotic to their body fluids. Here, we determined the phy...

Determining whether water quality is suitable is an important part of managing aquatic species for conservation, although it is often challenging to achieve. Past approaches have largely consisted of tests exposing individuals to artificial solutions, or field studies that examine the effect of a subset of water quality parameters on the distributi...

Biodiversity loss caused by invasive species is particularly problematic in freshwater ecosystems, which are among the world's most threatened habitats. Invasive fish such as the eastern mosquitofish, Gambusia holbrooki , have been implicated in the decline of amphibians, which suffer high extinction rates globally. Although G. holbrooki is one of...

Ontogenetic changes in disease susceptibility have been demonstrated in many vertebrate taxa, as immature immune systems and limited prior exposure to pathogens can place less developed juveniles at a greater disease risk. By causing the disease chytridiomycosis, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) infection has led to the decline of many amphibian...

Context Pathogens with reservoir hosts have been responsible for most disease-induced wildlife extinctions because the decline of susceptible hosts does not cause the decline of the pathogen. The existence of reservoirs for Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis limits population recovery and conservation actions for threatened amphibians. As such, the eff...

A simple diagnosis of the presence or absence of an infection is an uninformative metric when individuals differ considerably in their tolerance to different infection loads or resistance to rates of disease progression. Models that incorporate the relationship between the progression of the infection with the potential alternate outcomes provide a...

Trapping is a common sampling technique used to estimate fundamental population metrics of animal species such as abundance, survival and distribution. However, capture success for any trapping method can be heavily influenced by individuals' behavioural plasticity, which in turn affects the accuracy of any population estimates derived from the dat...

Mitigating the threat of habitat loss requires actions such as restoring and creating new habitat. In order to effectively achieve this, species habitat requirements and use patterns need to be understood. While many studies have been conducted on the habitat choice of species, these generally focused on habitat use during periods of high activity...

Surveillance of pathogens can lead to significant advances towards making effective decisions in research and management for species threatened by disease. Ba-trachochytrium dendrobatidis has been a major contributing factor to the global decline of amphibians. Knowledge of the distribution of B. dendrobatidis can contribute to understanding patter...

Invasive species management is a critical issue worldwide, but mitigation strategies are slow to develop, and invader populations often expand too rapidly for eradication to be feasible. Thus, reduction in numbers of individuals is the most heavily used management strategy for invasive pests. While long-term biocontrol agents may take years or deca...

Sustained demographic studies are essential for early detection of species decline in time for effective management response. A paucity of such background data hindered the potential for successful conservation during the global amphibian decline and remains problematic today. The current study analysed 6 years of mark-recapture data to determine t...

Prompt detection of declines in abundance or distribution of populations is critical when managing threatened species that have high population turnover. Population monitoring programs provide the tools necessary to identify and detect decreases in abundance that will threaten the persistence of key populations and should occur in an adaptive manag...

Budget: itemized budget of core requirements for each monitoring method used for L. aurea surveys at Sydney Olympic Park. Each method assumes a team of four people completing one survey period based from the Sydney Olympic Park lodge.

Suitability of habitat patches affects demographic processes and consequently influences the viability of populations. In order for managers to consider the potential of resources on a scale appropriate to their use, it is important to understand the processes that influence the ecology of threatened species. Differential growth rates of Litoria au...

Australia's largest snake-necked turtle, Chelodina (Macrochelodina) expansa (Family Chelidae), occurs broadly through the inland rivers and billabongs of eastern and southeastern Australia. The species is cryptic in habit, yet occupies waters heavily exploited and regulated by humans. Traditionally considered a riverine species, recent studies demo...

While the principles and steps to be followed in the recovery of a declining species are relatively straightforward, there is often a considerable gap between the theory and practice. One example is the decline of the bell frog complex in eastern Australia, which is comprised of three species: Litoria aurea, L. castanea, and L. raniformis. There is...

Breeding aggregations are a reproductive strategy to increase mate finding opportunity. However, because aggregations skew the distribution of mature animals through conspecific attraction, rather than resource availability, the distribution of breeding sites may be reduced, so that not all suitable breeding sites are used. To examine the relations...

Context The increasing intensity and extent of anthropogenically mediated salinisation in freshwater systems has the potential to affect freshwater species through physiological and ecological processes. Determining responses to salinisation is critical to predicting impacts on fauna. Aims We aimed to quantify the response of wild-caught turtles f...

Variations in water potential have marked effects on aspects of embryological development in reptiles. Therefore variation in the salinity of the incubation environment is likely to have significant consequences on the early life stage. The combination of an extended incubation period, coupled with the real threat of soil salinisation within their...

Hydrological regimes strongly influence ecological processes in river basins. Yet, the impacts of management regimes are unknown for many freshwater taxa in highly regulated rivers. We used radio‐telemetry to monitor the movement and activity of broad‐shelled river turtles Chelodina expansa to infer the impact of current water management practices...