Georgia Garrard

RMIT University | RMIT · Centre for Urban Research

Cities are crucial for supporting biodiversity and are likely to play an important role in helping respond to the global biodiversity crisis. Understanding how plants and animals utilize various urban spaces is essential for designing cities that accommodate both human and ecological needs. Informal green spaces (IGS) have been historically overloo...

Introduction Coffee is a ubiquitous global commodity that is cultivated with a wide range of practices, each with different, yet poorly understood trade‐offs between management intensity, yield, and biodiversity. For example, monocultures prioritise coffee production, but do not necessarily deliver the highest coffee yields, nor the greatest profit...

The motivations for incorporating nature into the design of cities have never been more compelling. Creating experiences with nature that occur every day (everyday nature) in cities could help reverse the fate of many threatened species and connect people with nature and living cultural traditions. However, this requires more than just urban greeni...

With a global footprint of 10 million hectares across 12.5 million farms, coffee is among the world’s most traded commodities. The coffee industry has launched a variety of initiatives designed to reduce coffee’s contribution to climate change and biodiversity loss and enhance the socio-economic conditions of coffee producers. We systematically rev...

Abstract Conservation and mitigation translocations aim for similar positive outcomes for species under threat, however different motivations drive their implementation. Despite the clear human component behind motivation, there has been limited examination of practitioner perceptions and how they compare across the conservation and mitigation sect...

As major policy actors (e.g. governments, global organisations) grapple with 'wicked' sustainability challenges, the use of demonstration projects or 'living labs' has promise in showcasing potential solutions. However, these projects can struggle to realise enduring change, with initial experimental deliverables tending not to be replicated and re...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are recognised as a means to address challenges such as heatwaves, flooding and biodiversity loss. Delivering these benefits at scale will require large areas of scarce urban land to be converted into green space. Here we show an approach by which cities can make substantial progress towards their sustainability targets...

Conservation professionals are familiar with value‐driven research and practice. However, recent efforts to use strategic communication, specifically conservation messaging, to affect targeted behaviour change or influence values and attitudes towards conservation introduce new ethical dilemmas that conservation professionals may not have considere...

Surveys aimed at finding threatened and invasive species can be challenging due to individual rarity and low and variable individual detection rates. Detection rate in plant surveys typically varies due to differences among observers, among the individual plants being surveyed (targets), and across background environments. Interactions among these...

Biodiversity loss is driven by human behavior, but there is uncertainty about the effectiveness of behavior‐change programs in delivering benefits to biodiversity. To demonstrate their value, the biodiversity benefits and cost‐effectiveness of behavior changes that directly or indirectly affect biodiversity need to be quantified. We adapted a struc...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly at the centre of urban strategies to mitigate heatwaves and flooding, improve public health and restore biodiversity. However, on-ground implementation has been slow, inconsistent and often limited to demonstration sites. A broad literature consistently highlights institutional barriers as a major reaso...

With COVID-19 dominating headlines, highlighting links between the pandemic and biodiversity may increase public awareness of the biodiversity crisis. However, ill-considered messages that frame nature as the problem rather than the solution could inadvertently propagate problematic narratives and undermine motivations and individual self-efficacy...

Biodiversity within cities is fundamental for human health and well-being, and delivers a wide range of critical ecosystem services. However, biodiversity is often viewed as an afterthought or final addition once an urban development nears completion. As such, provisions for biodiversity are typically tokenistic and do not achieve the experience of...

Cities globally are greening their urban fabric, but to contribute positively to the biodiversity extinction crisis, local governments must explicitly target actions for biodiversity. We apply the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) framework — nature for nature, society and culture — to elevate...

This report investigates the opportunities for threatened species conservation within Australian cities and towns

Suppressing expert knowledge can hide environmentally damaging practices and policies from public scrutiny. We surveyed ecologists and conservation scientists from universities, government, and industry across Australia to understand the prevalence and consequences of suppressing science communication. Government (34%) and industry (30%) respondent...

The conservation profession is increasingly seeking effective ways to reduce societal impact on biodiversity, including through targeted behavior change interventions. Multiple conservation behavior change programs exist, but there is also great uncertainty regarding which behaviors are most strategic to target. Behavioral prioritization is a tool...

Communication and advocacy approaches that influence attitudes and behaviors are key to addressing conservation problems, and the way an issue is framed can affect how people view, judge, and respond to an issue. Responses to conservation interventions can also be influenced by subtle wording changes in statements that may appeal to different value...

Beef production is a major driver of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions globally, and multiple studies recommend reducing beef production and consumption. Although there have been significant efforts from the biodiversity conservation sector toward reducing beef‐production impacts, there has been comparatively much less engagement in re...

Species common names underpin communication between researchers, stakeholders and the public. Changing unappealing (e.g., rough-skinned horned toad), misleading (e.g., lesser bird of paradise) or even immemorable (e.g., little grassbird) species names could be an effective, and inexpensive, way to improve engagement with and support for threatened...

Context. Feral cats (Felis catus) pose a significant threat to Australia’s native species and feral cat control is, therefore, an important component of threatened species management and policy. Australia’s Threatened Species Strategy articulates defined targets for feral cat control. Yet, currently, little is known about who is engaged in feral ca...

Changing human behavior and attitudes are key to conserving global biodiversity. Despite evidence from other disciplines that strategic messaging can influence behavior and attitudes, it remains unclear how to best design messages to benefit biodiversity. We conducted a systematic literature review to investigate the status of conservation messagin...

Current global enthusiasm for urban greening and bringing nature back into cities is unprecedented. Evidence of the socioecological benefits of large, permanent greenspaces is mounting, but the collective potential for pop‐up parks (PUPs) – small, temporary greenspaces – to augment urban ecosystem services is unknown. To showcase the potential of P...

In biodiversity conservation, the prevailing consensus is that optimistic messages should be used to inspire people to change their behaviour, but there is scarce empirical evidence that optimistic messages lead to favourable conservation behaviour change.

Grassland ecosystems across the globe have been extensively modified and degraded by agriculture and urban development, leaving conservation managers with a complex set of interacting legacies and opportunities to contend with. We advocate the use of state-and-transition models to assist conservation managers to deal with this complexity. Using a m...

Unpopular and uncharismatic species receive less conservation support, potentially impacting their long-term survival. This study assesses the attention directed towards Australian threatened species on the online social network Twitter, an increasingly common way for scientists and the general public to communicate about conservation. We find a di...

en Article impact statement: Continued development of conservation psychology is essential to addressing the challenges of biodiversity conservation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

Ecologists often classify species into binary groupings such as woodland or non-woodland birds. However, each ecologist may apply a different classification, which might impede progress in ecology and conservation by precluding direct comparison between studies. This study describes and tests a method for deriving empirically-based, ecologically-re...

Cities are increasingly considered important places for biodiversity conservation because they can harbor threatened species and because conservation in cities represents an opportunity to reconnect people with nature and the range of health and well-being benefits it provides. However, urbanization can be catastrophic for native species, and is a...

The study examined children's perception of space in the context of place-based education. It investigates: the cognitive attitudinal dispositions involved in perceiving space as 'empty'; and, how students' attitudes toward one grassland site inform their attitudes and behavioural intentions when applied to similar spaces which are spatially and te...

Making decisions about the management and conservation of nature is necessarily complex, with many competing pressures on natural systems, opportunities and benefits for different groups of people and a varying, uncertain social and ecological environment. An approach which is narrowly focused on either human development or environmental protection...

The critically endangered golden sun-moth Synemon plana occurs in urban fringe areas of southeastern Australia that are currently experiencing rapid and extensive development. The urban fringe is a complex and uncertain environment in which to manage threatened species with the intersection of fragmented natural habitats, built environments and hum...

Kareiva and Fuller (2016) consider the future prospects for biodiversity conservation in the face of the profound disruptions of the Anthropocene. They argue that more flexible and entrepreneurial approaches to conservation are needed. While some of the approaches they promote may work in particular situations, we believe their proposal risks unint...

Butterflies are arguably one of the most charismatic animal groups in the world and play a key role in plant-pollinators and plant-herbivore ecological networks. Although butterfly biodiversity and ecology has been thoroughly studied in most ecosystems, there is still very little recorded knowledge of their distribution and ecological interactions...

How did The Little Things that Run the City get its name? The Little Things that Run the City has been inspired by Edward O. Wilson’s famous quote: “…let me say a word on behalf of these little things that run the world” The quote was part of an address given by Wilson on occasion of the opening of the invertebrate exhibit of the National Zoolog...

Carbon farming programs typically aim to maximise landholder participation rates to achieve desired environmental outcomes. This is critical for programs aiming to tackle both climate change and biodiversity loss simultaneously, as landholder participation in those schemes directly determines the level of carbon sequestered and the potential biodiv...

On the 16th February 2016, the Urban Sustainability Branch of the City of Melbourne conducted a workshop with a working group of plant, fungi, bird, reptile, frog, mammal, insect and mollusc experts with the objective of identifying appropriate target species for rewilding, monitoring and public engagement in the City of Melbourne. The workshop was...

Aim Although urbanization impacts many species, there is little information on the patterns of occurrences of threatened species in urban relative to non‐urban areas. By assessing the extent of the distribution of threatened species across all A ustralian cities, we aim to investigate the currently under‐utilized opportunity that cities present for...

There is a longstanding debate regarding the need for ecology to develop consistent terminology. On one hand, consistent terminology would aid in synthesizing results between studies and ease communication of results. On the other hand, there is no proof that standardizing terminology is necessary and it could limit the scope of research in certain...

The topic of advocacy by scientists has been debated for decades, yet there is little agreement about whether scientists can or should be advocates. The fear of crossing a line into advocacy continues to hold many scientists back from contributing to public discourse, impoverishing public debate about important issues. We believe that progress in t...

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a key mechanism for protecting threatened plant and animal species. Many species are not perfectly detectable and, even when present, may remain undetected during EIA surveys, increasing the risk of site‐level loss or extinction of species. Numerous methods now exist for estimating detectability of plants an...

Human perception of plant leaf and flower colour can influence species management. Colour and colour contrast may influence the detectability of invasive or rare species during surveys. Quantitative, repeatable measures of plant colour are required for comparison across studies and generalisation across species. We present a standard method for mea...

In-situ photographs of the nine yellow flowering species and models of the two invasive Hieracium species used in the experiment. (TIF)

Photograph of a 1m2 quadrat showing the yellow flowering Craspediaaurantia - C. jamesii complex. (TIF)

Leaves of the five species collected to compare camera reliability. (TIF)

R code to extract CIE 1976 (L*a*b*) values from TIF file. (DOC)

L*, a* and b* histograms of flowers used in the study. The recorded distribution is shown with black circles, and the modelled distribution (Gaussian using mean and sd) is shown as a grey line. (TIF)

L*, a* and b* histograms of leaves used in the study. The recorded distribution is shown with black circles, and the modelled distribution (Gaussian using mean and sd) is shown as a grey line. (TIF)

Plant and animal survey detection rates are important for ecological surveys, environmental impact assessment, inva-sive species monitoring, and modeling species distributions. Species can be difficult to detect when rare but, in general, how detection probabilities vary with abundance is unknown. We developed a new detectability model based on the...

Imperfect detectability is a critical source of variation that limits ecological progress and frustrates effective conservation management. Available modelling methods provide valuable detectability estimates, but these are typically species‐specific. We present a novel application of time‐to‐detection modelling in which detectability of multiple s...

1. Informative Bayesian priors can improve the precision of estimates in ecological studies or estimate parameters for which little or no information is available. While Bayesian analyses are becoming more popular in ecology, the use of strongly informative priors remains rare, perhaps because examples of informative priors are not readily availabl...

There is now a substantial body of literature documenting the detectability of plants and animals under standard survey conditions. Despite the evidence that many flora and fauna species have detection probabilities of less than one, it is still the default assumption of most environmental impact assessment processes that if a species is present, i...