Nicholas A. Macgregor

• PhD, University of Cambridge
• Science manager at Parks Australia

Context Population monitoring that effectively detects population changes is an important component of threatened species management. Call broadcast surveys are regularly used for robust monitoring of vocal or territorial species; however, they can be resource intensive. Passive monitoring approaches involving citizen scientists and acoustic record...

Context Monitoring is crucial for understanding population trends of threatened species and for assessing the effectiveness of conservation efforts. However, population monitoring is subject to detection probabilities that can vary across factors such as time, type of vegetation cover, weather conditions and observer. Aims In this study, we investi...

Context Animal and plant populations in arid regions fluctuate in size and extent in response to rainfall, fire and predation. Understanding the influence of these drivers on the status and trends of populations is crucial to implementing effective conservation actions. Aims In this study, we quantified the long-term drivers and trends in populatio...

Norfolk Island, situated between Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia, has a rich, narrowly endemic land snail fauna, which has suffered considerably from habitat loss and introduced predators. Eleven species (Stylommatophora, Microcystidae) are currently listed by the IUCN and/or Australia’s EPBC Act 1999 as Endangered, Critically Endangered o...

Research in protected areas (PAs) is often dominated by scientists from outside the conservation agencies managing them. This can potentially lead to misalignment with local needs, insensitivity to the local context and a lack of investment in and use of local expertise. These issues often arise when international researchers work in another countr...

Small, isolated populations can be especially sensitive to poor habitat conditions due to their limited capacity to adapt or disperse. Management of such populations, with an objective to implement the most effective strategies, is a conservation priority. The Norfolk Island morepork ( Ninox novaeseelandiae undulata ) is a Critically Endangered haw...

The complete mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of the tjaku□a, Liopholis kintorei was obtained using next-generation sequencing, making it the first recorded mitogenome of the genus Liopholis and the Tiliquini . The mitogenome is 16,844bp in length with a base composition of A (31.7%), T (24.4%), G (14.6%), and C (29.3%) and a G + C content of 43.9...

Reforestation initiatives are underway across the world. However, we know relatively little about the ecological consequences of creating and restoring forest ecosystems, and there is a lack of studies examining the drivers of species colonisation and establishment across appropriate temporal and spatial scales to inform conservation practice. Usin...

Dataset associated with paper Waddell, E.H., Fuentes-Montemayor, E., Park, K.J., Carey, P., Guy, M., Macgregor, N.A. and Watts, K (2024) "Larger and structurally complex woodland creation sites provide greater benefits for woodland plants" Ecological Solutions and Evidence. 5(2), Article e12339. https://doi.org/10.1002/2688-8319.12339. Dataset cont...

Introduction Accurately quantifying the diet of species has implications for our understanding of their ecology and conservation. Yet, determining the dietary composition of threatened and elusive species in the wild is often difficult. Methods This study presents the first dietary assessment of tjakura (Liopholis kintorei) using non-invasive samp...

Biodiversity monitoring programmes should be designed with sufficient statistical power to detect population change. Here we evaluated the statistical power of monitoring to detect declines in the occupancy of forest birds on Christmas Island, Australia. We fitted zero-inflated binomial models to 3 years of repeat detection data (2011, 2013 and 201...

Most unprotected biodiversity is found outside state-owned protected areas, so developing effective conservation initiatives on privately and communally-owned land is critical. Conservationists have a long history of working with these landowners and their actions can be divided into two broad categories. The first is where they agree to take over...

Genetic diversity and population structure can have important implications for the management of threatened species. This is particularly true for small, isolated populations that have experienced significant declines or population bottlenecks. The Norfolk Island green parrot Cyanoramphus cookii is an endangered species at risk of inbreeding and lo...

Understanding the population dynamics of endangered species is crucial to their conservation. Stochastic population models can be used to explore factors involved in population change, contributing to the understanding of a species’ population dynamics. Norfolk Island Green Parrots Cyanoramphus cookii have undergone significant population fluctuati...

Islands, because of their small geographic area and tendency for high levels of species endemism, present opportunities for comprehensive biodiversity assessment and conservation. Norfolk Island (35 km2 in area) is in the South Pacific Ocean, between New Zealand and New Caledonia, approximately 1500 km east of Australia. To assess the conservation...

Reliable information on population size is fundamental to the management of threatened species. For wild species, mark-recapture methods are a cornerstone of abundance estimation. Here, we show the first application of the close-kin mark-recapture (CKMR) method to a terrestrial species of high conservation value; the Christmas Island flying-fox (CI...

Protected area (PA) networks have in the past been constructed to include all major habitats, but have often been developed through consideration of only a few indicator taxa or across restricted areas, and rarely account for global climate change. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) aims to improve the efficiency of biodiversity conservation, p...

This project has developed and tested a framework for assessing research value across the life cycle of conservation research projects and programs. This is the first comprehensive attempt of its kind to build and test a multimodal, integrated, qualitative and quantitative framework for achieving and assessing value in environmental research. The r...

Animals that breed in cavities formed through decay or mechanical damage often face limitations to reproduction due to a shortage of nest sites. Artificial nests are commonly deployed to increase the short‐term availability of breeding sites for these species. Often this is an effective approach; however artificial nests are costly and may be ignor...

Monitoring of threatened species is a critical part of conserving biodiversity. It is needed to understand population trajectories, threatening processes, and the type and effectiveness of management responses needed to ensure persistence and recovery. Characteristics of some plant species (e.g. immobility) should render them amenable to monitoring...

Protected areas are important for preventing biodiversity declines, yet indicators of species' trends in protected areas rarely include threatened species. We use data from the first national Threatened Species Index developed in Australia to report on trends for threatened and near‐threatened birds inside and outside terrestrial and marine protect...

In Europe, extensively managed grasslands have undergone large-scale declines due to intensive agriculture and abandonment. Their restoration supports arthropod biodiversity within farming systems. We investigated limiting factors for arthropod establishment during grassland restoration across a chronosequence of 52 restoration sites established by...

Measuring, reporting, and forecasting research impact beyond academia has become increasingly important to demonstrate and understand real-world benefits. This is arguably most important in crisis disciplines such as medicine, environmental sustainability and biodiversity conservation, where application of new knowledge is urgently needed to improv...

Context Climate change is a severe threat to biodiversity. Areas with a high variety of microclimates may provide opportunities for species to persist in a changing climate. Objectives Test the extent to which microclimate is an important determinant of the distribution of a widespread upland passerine, the meadow pipit Anthus pratensis, and wheth...

This handbook aims to help the designers of nature networks by identifying the principles of network design and describing the evidence that underpins the desirable features of nature networks. It builds on the Making Space for Nature report of Lawton et al. (2010), outlining some of the practical aspects of implementing a nature network plan, as w...

Context Land-use change and habitat fragmentation are well known drivers of biodiversity declines. In forest birds, it has been proposed that landscape change can cause increased predation pressure that leads to population declines or community change. Predation can also have non-lethal effects on prey, such as creating ‘landscapes of fear’. Howeve...

Global conservation targets to reverse biodiversity declines and halt species extinctions are not being met despite decades of conservation action. However, a lack of measurable change in biodiversity indicators towards these targets is not necessarily a sign that conservation has failed; instead, temporal lags in species’ responses to conservation...

Habitat loss and fragmentation greatly affect biological diversity. Actions to counteract their negative effects include increasing the quality, amount and connectivity of seminatural habitats at the landscape scale. However, much of the scientific evidence underpinning landscape restoration comes from studies of habitat loss and fragmentation, and...

Landscape context can affect how individuals perceive patch quality during colonization. However, although context-dependent colonization has been observed in aquatic environments, it has rarely been studied in terrestrial environments or at large spatial scales. In this paper, we assessed how landscape context influenced colonization rates in a la...

Protecting biodiversity against the impacts of climate change requires effective conservation strategies that safeguard species at risk of extinction¹. Microrefugia allowed populations to survive adverse climatic conditions in the past2,3, but their potential to reduce extinction risk from anthropogenic warming is poorly understood3–5, hindering ou...

Ecosystem function and resilience are compromised when habitats become fragmented due to land‐use change. This has led to national and international conservation strategies aimed at restoring habitat extent and improving functional connectivity (i.e., maintaining dispersal processes). However, biodiversity responses to landscape‐scale habitat creat...

New native woodlands are typically created in a small and isolated configuration, potentially reducing their value as a resource for biodiversity. The use of ecological networks for habitat restoration and creation could be beneficial for woodland biodiversity. This approach is conceptualised as local‐ and landscape‐scale conservation actions desig...

It is important for conservationists to be able to assess the risks that climate change poses to species, in order to inform decision making. Using standardised and repeatable methods, we present a national-scale assessment of the risks of range loss and opportunities for range expansion that climate change could pose for over 3000 plants and anima...

Protected areas (PAs) are vital for conserving biodiversity, but many PA networks consist of fragmented habitat patches that poorly represent species and ecosystems. One possible solution is to create conservation landscapes that surround and link these PAs. This often involves working with a range of landowners and agencies to develop large-scale...

Conservation strategies to tackle habitat loss and fragmentation require actions at local (e.g. improving/expanding existing habitat patches) and landscape level (e.g. creating new habitat in the matrix). However, the relative importance of these actions for biodiversity is still poorly understood, leading to debate on how to prioritise conservatio...

There has been a growing interest across the British conservation community in recent years in establishing conservation over large areas. Much of this thinking was crystallised in the Making Space for Nature report (Lawton and others 2010) , and has since become prominent in conservation policy. To maximise the success of future projects, there is...

There has been a growing interest across the British conservation community in recent years in establishing conservation over large areas. Much of this thinking was crystallised in the Making Space for Nature report (Lawton and others 2010) , and has since become prominent in conservation policy. To maximise the success of future projects, there is...

It is increasingly recognized that ecological restoration demands conservation action beyond the borders of existing protected areas. This requires the coordination of land uses and management over a larger area, usually with a range of partners, which presents novel institutional challenges for conservation planners. Interviews were undertaken wit...

Table S1. PCA Summaries.

Natural experiments have been proposed as a way of complementing manipulative experiments to improve ecological understanding and guide management. There is a pressing need for evidence from such studies to inform a shift to landscape-scale conservation, including the design of ecological networks. Although this shift has been widely embraced by co...

Popular press article on how microclimate interacts with climate change, and the implications for wildlife conservation

We welcome the response of Tooley (2015) to our article describing a new meta-database of Holocene sediment cores for England. In our article we describe the online publication of this meta-database, arising from systematic meta-search. We define its scope and the meta-data it contains, before providing the data themselves (in the Electronic Supple...

Extracting sediment cores for palaeoecological and archaeological investigations has occurred extensively across England since the early 20th century. Surprisingly, there has been comparatively little collation of these valuable publications and potential sources of data; for example, a search on the European Pollen Database (1st Aug 2014 edition)...

Title Landscape-scale conservation: the role of space and time in the realisation of biodiversity benefits Authors Nick Synes1, Kevin Watts2, Kamil Barton3, Stephen Palmer3, Justin Travis3 Affiliations 1 Institute of Complex Systems Simulation, University of Southampton, University Road, SO30 3HF, UK. 2 Forest Research, Alice Holt Lodge, Farnham, S...

Microclimate has been known to drive variation in the distribution and abundance of insects for some time. Until recently however, quantification of microclimatic effects has been limited by computing constraints and the availability of fine-scale biological data. Here, we tested fine-scale patterns of persistence/extinction in butterflies and moth...

The development of ecological networks could help reverse the effects of habitat fragmentation on woodland biodiversity in temperate agricultural landscapes. However, efforts to create networks need to be underpinned by clear evidence of the relative efficacy of local (e.g. improving or expanding existing habitat patches) versus landscape-scale act...

The implementation of adaptation actions in local conservation management is a new and complex task with multiple facets, influenced by factors differing from site to site. A transdisciplinary perspective is therefore required to identify and implement effective solutions. To address this, the International Conference on Managing Protected Areas un...

Projected impacts of climate change on the populations and distributions of species pose a challenge for conservationists. In response, a number of adaptation strategies to enable species to persist in a changing climate have been proposed. Management to maximise the quality of habitat at existing sites may reduce the magnitude or frequency of clim...

Although good general principles for climate change adaptation in conservation have been developed, it is proving a challenge to translate them into more detailed recommendations for action. To improve our understanding of what adaptation might involve in practice, we investigated how the managers of conservation areas in eastern England are consid...

The Natural Environment White Paper published by the government in 20111 and the conservation strategy for England, Biodiversity 20202, both highlight the importance of establishing coherent ecological networks to benefit wildlife and people, and the consequent need to consider conservation at a large or ‘landscape’ scale. A strong policy direction...

Natural England has compiled a database of Large-Scale Conservation Projects and interviewed many practitioners involved in these schemes. This article reviews the findings to date and considers how the achievements of current and previous schemes can be taken forward.

Given the importance of large scale processes on the distributions and abundance of both biodiversity and ecosystem services – particularly in the face of climate change – there are growing calls for increasing the number of joined-up, ‘landscape-scale’ conservation initiatives. However, the evidence for the effectiveness of a ‘joined-up’ approach...

Agricultural land covers over 70% of England and provides a wide range of important benefits to the society. These benefits are vulnerable to both the direct and indirect effects of climate change. Successful adaptation by the agriculture and land management sector is therefore vital, and this adaptation must be sustainable. This chapter introduces...

Exploitation of hosts by brood parasitic cuckoos is expected to stimulate a coevolutionary arms race of adaptations and counteradaptations. However, some hosts have not evolved defenses against parasitism. One hypothesis to explain a lack of host defenses is that the life-history strategies of some hosts reduce the cost of parasitism to the extent...

Descriptive studies of provisioning in cooperatively breeding superb fairy-wrens, Malurus cyaneus, show that females are responsive to the needs of the brood, increasing nest visits with brood size and age. Both dominant and helper males provision at a constant rate regardless of brood size and age, but dominant males reduce provisioning as the num...