James E. M. Watson

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia · School of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Identification of spatial gradients in ecosystem vulnerability to global climate change and local stressors is an important step in the formulation and implementation of appropriate countermeasures. Here we build on recent work to map ecoregional exposure to future climate, using an envelope-based gauge of future climate stability—defined as a meas...

The acquisition or designation of new protected areas is usually based on criteria for representation of different ecosystems or land-cover classes, and it is unclear how well-threatened species are conserved within protected-area networks. Here, we assessed how Australia's terrestrial protected-area system (89 million ha, 11.6% of the continent) o...

The Galapagos Archipelago is renowned for its high endemism but little effort has been made to quantify the human disturbance that compromises the islands' ecological integrity. We provide a quantitative assessment of anthropogenic degradation, which we define as areas either transformed by direct human activity or heavily invaded by four of the mo...

An evidence-based approach to the conservation management of a species requires knowledge of that species' status, distribution, ecology, and threats. Coupled with budgets for specific conservation strategies, this knowledge allows prioritisation of funding toward activities that maximise benefit for the species. However, many threatened species ar...

Although ideas about preventive actions for pandemics have been advanced during the COVID-19 crisis, there has been little consideration for how they can be operationalised through governance structures within the context of the wildlife trade for human consumption. To date, pandemic governance has mostly focused on outbreak surveillance, containme...

Budgeting for biodiversity conservation requires realistic estimates of threat abatement costs. However, data on threat management costs are often unavailable or unable to be extrapolated across relevant locations and scales. Conservation expenditure largely occurs without a priori cost estimates of management activities and is not recorded in ways...

Despite the importance of safeguarding forests and woodlands for achieving global climate and biodiversity agendas, logging continues across most forested countries. Forestry advocates often claim logging has minimal impacts, but rarely consider the cumulative threat deforestation and degradation has had, and continue to have, on species. Using New...

Australia’s Red Goshawk (Erythrotriorchis radiatus) is a taxonomically distinct raptor endemic to the tropics and sub-tropics of eastern and northern Australia, and the Australian mainland’s rarest bird of prey. Classified as Vulnerable when legislation was first enacted in 1992, the species’ status and distribution remain unclear, and it is possib...

Insects dominate the biosphere, yet insect populations are plummeting worldwide. Massive conservation efforts will be needed to reverse these declines. Protected areas (PAs) could act as a safeguard against extinction, but documented coverage of insect representation across the PA estate is limited. Here, we show that 76% of 89,151 insect species a...

Maintaining peace and conserving biodiversity hinge on an international system of cooperation codified in institutions, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brings recent progress to a crossroads. Against this backdrop, we address some implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the governance of biodiversity conservation both within and beyond Ru...

The Painted Button-quail Turnix varius is a widespread and frequently encountered ground-dwelling bird endemic to Australia. Despite being regularly recorded throughout its distribution, our understanding of this species’ vocalisations is poor. Published accounts are limited to brief descriptions without quantitative analyses in a standardised form...

Earth’s wilderness areas are reservoirs of genetic information and carbon storage systems, and are vital to reducing extinction risks. Retaining the conservation value of these areas is fundamental to achieving global biodiversity conservation goals; however, climate and land-use risk can undermine their ability to provide these functions. The exte...

All tropical savannahs are experiencing extensive transformation and degradation, yet conservation strategies do not adequately address threats to savannahs. Here, using a recently published ecosystem intactness metric, we assess the current condition of tropical savannahs across Earth, finding that <3 % remain highly intact. Moreover, their overal...

The draft Global Biodiversity Framework proposes to increase protected areas and OECMs to at least 30 per cent of land and ocean by 2030 (30x30). Such areas are central to conservation, but only if effectively managed and equitably governed. In practice, governments often recognise areas that do not achieve successful outcomes or respect human righ...

Humanity is on a pathway of unsustainable loss of the natural systems upon which we, and all life, rely. To date, global efforts to deliver internationally‐agreed goals to reduce carbon emissions, halt biodiversity loss, and retain essential ecosystem services, have been poorly integrated. All these goals rely in part on preserving natural (e.g. na...

Mining companies increasingly commit to a net positive impact on biodiversity. However, assessing the industry's progress toward achieving this goal is limited by knowledge of current mining threats to biodiversity and the relevant opportunities available for them to improve conservation outcomes. Here, we investigate the global exposure of terrest...

Biodiversity offsets aim to counterbalance the residual impacts of development on species and ecosystems. Guidance documents explicitly recommend that biodiversity offset actions be located close to the location of impact because of higher potential for similar ecological conditions, but allowing greater spatial flexibility has been proposed. We ex...

Reducing deforestation underpins global biodiversity conservation efforts. However, this focus on retaining forest cover overlooks the multitude of anthropogenic pressures that can degrade forest quality and imperil biodiversity. We use remotely sensed indices of tropical rainforest structural condition and associated human pressures to quantify th...

The current ornithological literature describes the Painted Button-quail Turnix varius having a distribution in Queensland that reaches its northern limit around Cooktown. North of Cooktown, the species is thought to be replaced by the Buff-breasted Button-quail T. olivii in savanna habitats of Cape York Peninsula. Here we present observations of P...

Anthropogenic pressures are driving insect declines across the world. Although protected areas (PAs) play a prominent role in safeguarding many vertebrate species from human-induced threats, insects are not widely considered when designing PA systems or building strategies for PA management. We review the effectiveness of PAs for insect conservatio...

Among the conservation community, it is well known that Earth’s mass species extinction crisis is getting worse. Yet, an often neglected problem is the need for effectively communicating the species extinction crisis to diverse audiences in ways that catalyse immediate action. Here we generated a streamlined threatened species recovery report card...

China has emerged as the largest overseas financier of hydropower in low-income countries. Since hydropower dams pose risks to biodiversity, an examination of potential biodiversity impacts of Chinese projects is critically needed. We conducted a biodiversity risk and safeguards assessment of Chinese-funded dams being built in Belt and Road Initiat...

The 2019/20 wildfire season was devastating for Australia’s biodiversity and unprecedented in its extent and severity, yet the consequences for sites important for biodiversity and other world heritage values remain unknown. Here, we summarise the 2019/20 wildfire impacts on key sites set aside for, or identified as being important for, biodiversit...

In the summer of 2019–2020, southern Australia experienced the largest fires on record, detrimentally impacting the habitat of native species, many of which were already threatened by past and current anthropogenic land use. A large-scale restoration effort to improve degraded species habitat would provide fire-affected species with the chance to r...

The Buff-breasted Button-quail Turnix olivii is arguably the rarest, most threatened bird species in Australia. Despite many reports over the last four decades, the species has never been reliably photographed nor its vocalisations definitively recorded. No records in contemporary literature are supported irrefutably. Consequently, examining histor...

Ambitious conservation efforts are needed to stop the global biodiversity crisis. In this study, we estimate the minimum land area to secure important biodiversity areas, ecologically intact areas, and optimal locations for representation of species ranges and ecoregions. We discover that at least 64 million square kilometers (44% of terrestrial ar...

Due to climate change, megafires are increasingly common, and have sudden, extensive impacts on many species over vast areas, leaving decision‐makers uncertain about how best to prioritize recovery. Here, we provide a decision‐support framework to prioritize conservation actions to improve species outcomes immediately after a megafire. The framewor...

Many threats to biodiversity can be predicted and are well mapped but others are uncertain in their extent, impact on biodiversity, and ability for conservation efforts to address, making them more difficult to account for in spatial conservation planning efforts, and as a result, they are often ignored. Here, we use a spatial prioritisation analys...

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for global environmental agreements is how higher-income and lower-income countries share the costs of implementing them. This problem has become particularly acute as biodiversity and climate ambitions have increased across recent COPs (Conferences of Parties). Here, we estimate the likely distribution of costs...

Indicators supporting implementation of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) are likely to be used not only to monitor progress toward achieving agreed goals and targets, but also to help prioritise specific actions to address shortfalls in this achievement as efficiently as possible. To perform this dual role, adopted indicators must...

Area-based conservation measures, including protected areas (PA) and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECM), play an important role in biodiversity conservation. In the Brazilian Amazon, even though Conservation Units and Indigenous Lands have been shown to reduce deforestation, few studies have addressed Quilombola Territories, an...

The Chestnut-backed Button-quail Turnix castanotus is a small, cryptic, ground-dwelling species endemic to savanna ecosystems of northern Australia. Due to aspects of its ecology, cryptic plumage and behaviour, and the remoteness of most of its distribution, there are few published observations from the field documenting its breeding biology. The e...

1.Budgeting for biodiversity conservation requires realistic estimates of the costs of threat abatement. However, data on the costs of managing threats to biodiversity is often unavailable or unable to be extrapolated across relevant locations and scales due to a lack of transparency and consistency in how it was collated. Conservation expenditure...

Habitat loss is the leading cause of the global decline in biodiversity, but the influence of human pressure within the matrix surrounding habitat fragments remains poorly understood. Here, we measure the relationship between fragmentation (the degree of fragmentation and the degree of patch isolation), matrix condition (measured as the extent of h...

The main effort to secure threatened species globally is to set aside land and sea for their conservation via governance arrangements such as protected areas. But not even the biggest protected area estate will cover enough area to halt most species declines. Consequently, there is a need for assessments of how species habitats are distributed acro...

Button-quail Turnix spp. forage in a unique manner, leaving behind circular scratched depressions in the substrate known as platelets. These platelets offer an indirect method of surveying an otherwise cryptic and shy group of birds. Painted Button-quail T. varius are well known for creating platelets throughout most of their distribution. However,...

Management of the land-sea interface is considered essential for global conservation and sustainability objectives, as coastal regions maintain natural processes that support biodiversity and the livelihood of billions of people. However, assessments of coastal regions have focused on either strictly the terrestrial or marine realm, and as a conseq...

Research into the suitability of autonomous recording units (ARUs) when surveying for vocal species is increasing. Simultaneously, there has been extensive research into methods for efficiently extracting signals of interest from the acoustic data sets that accrue from the deployment of ARUs. For some species, bioacoustic monitoring supported by co...

Institutional arrangements are key for problem-solving; therefore, pandemics require a strong governance response. While a plethora of ideas about prevention actions for pandemics have been advanced, there has been relatively limited consideration for how those can be operationalized through governance macro structures, particularly within the cont...

Rapid climate change is impacting biodiversity, ecosystem function, and human well‐being. Though the magnitude and trajectory of climate change are becoming clearer, our understanding of how these changes reshape terrestrial life zones—distinct biogeographic units characterized by biotemperature, precipitation, and aridity representing broad‐scale...

James Watson and Oscar Venter introduce the concept of wilderness and its role in conservation efforts.

The rise in global commitments to restore habitat underlines its importance to halt biodiversity loss and abate climate change. To effectively plan for landscape‐scale restoration efforts, decision makers need to prioritise where restoration should occur and have a method to estimate its cost. Here, we describe a systematic approach to determine wh...

Marine species are declining at an unprecedented rate, catalyzing many nations to adopt conservation and management targets within their jurisdictions. However, marine species and the biophysical processes that sustain them are naive to international borders. An understanding of the prevalence of cross-border species distributions is important for...

Protected areas are highly heterogeneous in their effectiveness at buffering human pressure, which may hamper their ability to conserve species highly sensitive to human activities. Here, we use 60 million bird observations from eBird to estimate the sensitivity to human pressure of each bird species breeding in the Americas. Concerningly, we find...

Despite substantial conservation efforts, the loss of ecosystems continues globally, along with related declines in species and nature’s contributions to people. An effective ecosystem goal, supported by clear milestones, targets and indicators, is urgently needed for the post-2020 global biodiversity framework and beyond to support biodiversity co...

Australia is in the midst of an extinction crisis, having already lost 10% of terrestrial mammal fauna since European settlement and with hundreds of other species at high risk of extinction. The decline of the nation's biota is a result of an array of threatening processes; however, a comprehensive taxon-specific understanding of threats and their...

The imperative of a global transition to renewables to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 calls for an examination of the associated biodiversity risks. Hydropower is the biggest source of renewable energy globally, and its remaining untapped potential is concentrated in low and lower-middle income countries which are also among the world’s most bi...

Minimising the environmental impacts of biofuel production is an urgent global challenge. Over the next decade, increased demand for sugarcane-based ethanol in Brazil could result in over one million hectares of the nation's native forest and grassland being replaced directly by sugarcane or indirectly by displaced crops and pastureland. Here we in...

To achieve the goals of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, we must identify representative targets that effectively protect biodiversity and can be implemented at a national level. We developed a framework to identify synergies between biodiversity and carbon across the Asian region and proposed a stepwise approach based on scalable prior...

International trade is responsible for connecting human and natural systems across distant countries, and has profound implications for sustainability. In particular, tele-coupling, the socioeconomic and environmental interactions between distant countries as a result of, among others, global trade, typically leaves less affluent nations bearing th...

Signatory countries to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are formulating goals and indicators through 2050 under the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). Among the goals is increasing the integrity of ecosystems. The CBD is now seeking input toward a quantifiable definition of integrity and methods to track it globally. Here, w...

Nations of the world failed to fully achieve any of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010 targets, and the future of biodiversity hangs in the balance. Nations must not let unambitious targets in the current draft of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework prevent them from maximizing their biodiversity-conservation actions over the next...