Richard A Fuller

University of Queensland | UQ · School of Biological Sciences

Nature within cities will have a central role in helping address key global public health challenges associated with urbanization. However, there is almost no guidance on how much or how frequently people need to engage with nature, and what types or characteristics of nature need to be incorporated in cities for the best health outcomes. Here we u...

There is mounting empirical evidence that interacting with nature delivers measurable benefits to people. Reviews of this topic have generally focused on a specific type of benefit, been limited to a single discipline, or covered the benefits delivered from a particular type of interaction. Here we construct novel typologies of the settings, intera...

Migratory species depend on a suite of interconnected sites. Threats to unprotected links in these chains of sites are driving rapid population declines of migrants around the world, yet the extent to which different parts of the annual cycle are protected remains unknown. We show that just 9% of 1451 migratory birds are adequately covered by prote...

Protected areas vary enormously in their contribution to conserving biodiversity, and the inefficiency of protected area systems is widely acknowledged. However, conservation plans focus overwhelmingly on adding new sites to current protected area estates. Here we show that the conservation performance of a protected area system can be radically im...

Effective conservation of migratory species relies on habitat protection throughout their annual cycle. Although protected areas (PAs) play a central role in conservation, their effectiveness at conserving habitats across the annual cycle of migratory species has rarely been assessed. We developed seasonal ecological niche models for 418 migratory...

Much of the annual cycle of threatened migratory shorebirds is spent in non‐breeding areas, but there have been few studies on how that habitat is used at fine‐scale. Tracking data from 13 endangered far eastern curlews at three Australian non‐breeding locations revealed that home range size and maximum daily displacement varied substantially among...

Drone use has increased in the last decade, prompting efforts to manage their operation near wildlife. These efforts are hampered by variations in methods among studies, leading to evidence that is fragmented, inconsistent, and incomplete. To address this, we extracted evidence from 194 studies involving drones and birds, covering 314 species, incl...

Engagement in biodiversity citizen science initiatives can confer health and wellbeing benefits to individuals and communities. Yet, few biodiversity citizen science initiatives are explicitly planned to optimize health and wellbeing as a potential co-benefit, leading to missed opportunities for biodiversity conservation and human health. In this p...

Many of the proposed solutions to the global biodiversity crisis rely on national governments to act. The conservation movement needs to motivate governments or face an ongoing extinction crisis. Here we explore how linking biodiversity to electoral systems may assist in motivating government action. Using Australia as a case study, we analyze the...

Context Landscape change affects biological diversity and the distribution of species traits related to spiritual, educational, and recreational benefits people derive from nature. These traits are associated with color, song and behavioral characteristics that influence people's perceptions of how attractive an assemblage is. However, the environm...

Abstract The scarcity of long-term observational data has limited the use of statistical or machine-learning techniques for predicting intraannual ecological variation. However, time-stamped citizen-science observation records, supported by media data such as photographs, are increasingly available. In the present article, we present a novel frame...

Active conservation management is crucial for maintaining and recovering populations of threatened species. Yet, there are remarkably few studies quantifying the benefits of conservation management and comparing ecological and anthropogenic influences on populations. We investigate these issues using the Black-faced Spoonbill Platalea minor as a ca...

The rise of citizen science (also called community science) has led to vast quantities of species observation data collected by members of the public. Citizen science data tend to be unevenly distributed across space and time, but the treatment of sampling bias varies between studies, and interactions between different biases are often overlooked....

A full-life cycle approach is a tenet of migratory species conservation, yet the degree to which this is achieved remains largely unassessed. This knowledge gap can be addressed using the concept of social-ecological fit, understood as the match between governance and ecological dimensions. Here, we assess the social-ecological fit for conserving m...

Access to urban nature is an important contributor to human health. Yet evidence of nature’s benefits comes overwhelmingly from the Global North and might not directly translate to cities in the Global South. Here, using survey data from 1,119 residents of Asunción, Paraguay, we found that the context and intentionality of nature exposure and the f...

The pace and scale of environmental change represent major challenges to many organisms. Animals that move long distances, such as migratory birds, are especially vulnerable to change since they need chains of intact habitat along their migratory routes. Estimating the resilience of such species to environmental changes assists in targeting conserv...

Given the increasing sophistication of virtualreality systems in providing immersivenature experiences, there is the potentialfor analogous health benefits to those thatarise from real nature experiences. We call forresearch to better understand the human–nature–technology interaction to overcomepotential pitfalls of the technology and designtailor...

Feeling unsafe is an important barrier to spending time in nature and therefore gaining the benefits that such experiences offer. Some research suggests that dense vegetation in green spaces can impede visibility, create hiding places for would-be offenders and reduce perceptions of safety among visitors. Drawing on data from 352 residents of a met...

Eradicating invasive predators from islands can result in substantial recovery of seabirds, but the mechanisms that drive population changes remain poorly understood. Meta‐analyses have recently revealed that immigration is surprisingly important to the recovery of philopatric seabirds, but it is not known whether dispersal and philopatry interact...

Tracking the state of biodiversity over time is critical to successful conservation, but conventional monitoring schemes tend to be insufficient to adequately quantify how species' abundances and distributions are changing. One solution to this issue is to leverage data generated by citizen scientists, who collect vast quantities of data at tempora...

This Framework establishes a vision and identifies pathways for SM Prime to achieve sustainability outcomes in SM Bay City development in Manila Bay. The framework was developed by The University of Queensland in close collaboration with SM, Pasay City Government, and the Philippine Reclamation Authority.

As keystone structures in urban ecosystems, trees are critical to addressing many of the current livability, health, and environmental challenges facing cities. Every day, trees are removed from urban landscapes as part of routine management. These tree removals are an opportunity for implementing manipulative experiments to directly measure the so...

Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Focusing on Bangladesh, a tropical megadiverse and mega‐populated country, we examined the im...

The tropics contain a vast majority of species, yet our understanding of tropical biodiversity is limited. Here we combine species locality data from scientific databases and social media to examine the coverage of species by existing protected areas in Bangladesh and identify priority areas for future expansion. Although protected areas cover 4.6%...

Access to urban nature is an important contributor to global health. Yet, evidence on nature’s benefits comes overwhelmingly from the global north and such evidence might not directly translate to the global south. Using survey data from 1119 residents of Asuncion, Paraguay, we found that context and intentionality of nature exposure, and function...

Drone use has increased in the last decade prompting management efforts to regulate flights near vulnerable wildlife; however, these efforts are hindered by a lack of data characterising drone‐induced wildlife disturbance. Many shorebird populations are rapidly declining and efforts to survey them can be hampered by the inaccessibility of their hab...

Experimentally manipulating urban tree abundance and structure can help explore the complex and reciprocal interactions among people, biodiversity and the services urban forests provide to humans and wildlife. In this study we take advantage of scheduled urban tree removals to experimentally quantify the benefits that urban trees provide to humans...

Aim Mining is increasingly pressuring areas of critical importance for biodiversity conservation, such as the Brazilian Amazon. Biodiversity data are limited in the tropics, restricting the scope for risks to be appropriately estimated before mineral licensing decisions are made. As the distributions and range sizes of other taxa differ markedly fr...

Citizen science programs are becoming increasingly popular among naturalists but remain heavily biased taxonomically and geographically. However, with the explosive popularity of social media and the near-ubiquitous availability of smartphones, many post wildlife photographs on social media. Here, we illustrate the potential of harvesting these dat...

Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Here, focussing on Bangladesh - a tropical mega-diverse and mega-populated country, we examin...

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...

Global efforts to deliver internationally agreed goals to reduce carbon emissions, halt biodiversity loss, and retain essential ecosystem services have been poorly integrated. These goals rely in part on preserving natural (e.g., native, largely unmodified) and seminatural (e.g., low intensity or sustainable human use) forests, woodlands, and grass...

Multi-species indicators (MSIs) have been useful tools for reflecting the state of taxa and ecosystems at global, regional, and national levels. However, most indicators are from Europe and North America, and there are few from the world’s major tropical and subtropical biodiversity hotspots, often in large part because of insufficient data availab...

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...

Although several countries along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway have recently begun reporting population trends and identifying threats to migratory waterbirds, there remains rather sparse geographical coverage of systematic waterbird monitoring, impeding our understanding of the flyway-wide status of waterbird populations. To fill this gap, we...

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...

Urban nature management is usually guided by the most common, frequently mentioned, or easily elicited perceptions expressed by a dominant cultural group. This is unlikely to encourage widespread community support or foster urban nature stewardship in the long run. Considering how people representing diverse cultural identities perceive the value o...

Antarctic terrestrial biodiversity faces multiple threats, from invasive species to climate change. Yet no large-scale assessments of threat management strategies exist. Applying a structured participatory approach, we demonstrate that existing conservation efforts are insufficient in a changing world, estimating that 65% (at best 37%, at worst 97%...

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...

Several hundred butterfly species show some form of migratory behaviour. Here we identify how the methodologies available for studying butterfly migration have changed over time, and document geographic and taxonomic foci in the study of butterfly migration. We review publications on butterfly migration published in six languages (English, Simplifi...

Agricultural expansion is a pervasive threat to biodiversity, and intensification of farming activities can reduce the diversity and abundance of farmland‐associated species. Tracking these changes to monitor and manage the biodiversity impacts of farming requires identification of farmland‐associated species – a well‐established category in Europe...

Human-induced threats are severely impacting biodiversity globally. Although protected areas play an essential role in safeguarding biodiversity from anthropogenic threats, the performance of such areas in tropical countries remains poorly understood. Here we examined the capacity of protected areas in Bangladesh to represent biodiversity, and iden...

As the number of observations submitted to the citizen science platform iNaturalist continues to grow, it is increasingly important that these observations can be identified to the finest taxonomic level, maximizing their value for biodiversity research. Here, we explore the benefits of acting as an identifier on iNaturalist.

Effective conservation of migratory species relies on protection throughout their annual cycle ¹ , something that has not been assessed globally for migratory insects. Here, we develop seasonal ecological niche models for 405 migratory butterfly species globally to assess whether they are adequately covered by protected areas (PAs) across their ful...

Effective conservation of migratory species relies on protection throughout their annual cycle, something that has not been assessed globally for migratory insects. Here, we develop seasonal ecological niche models for 405 migratory butterfly species globally to assess whether they are adequately covered by protected areas (PAs) across their full a...

Every year, millions of birds migrate between breeding and nonbreeding habitat, but the relative numbers of animals moving between sites are difficult to observe directly. Here we propose FlywayNet, a discrete network model based on observed count data, to determine the most likely migration links between regions using statistical modelling and eff...

Each year, billions of birds migrate across the globe, and interpretation of weather radar signals is increasingly being used to document the spatial and temporal migration patterns in Europe and America. Such approaches are yet to be applied in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF), one of the most species-rich and threatened flyways in the wo...

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...

Changing human behaviour and social systems are key to reversing the global biodiversity crisis. Pro‐environmental behaviour is guided by values and connection with nature, but because they have mostly been studied separately, the interplay between values and nature connection in influencing pro‐environmental behaviour remains unclear. In particula...

While systematic biodiversity surveys are common in the Global North, much of the tropics remains vastly under-surveyed. With the rise in popularity of social media and camera phones, millions of people are now sharing their photographs online, which can be an effective source of biodiversity occurrence data. Here, we report on just such an exercis...

Assessments of the status of tidal flats, one of the most extensive coastal ecosystems, have been hampered by a lack of data on their global distribution and change. Here we present globally consistent, spatially-explicit data of the occurrence of tidal flats, defined as sand, rock or mud flats that undergo regular tidal inundation. More than 1.3 m...

Citizen science programmes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and popular among those with an interest in natural history, but remain the domain of a relatively small portion of the public and heavily biased toward certain areas. Although systematic recording of biodiversity data has been practiced for centuries in the Global North, many tropi...

Citizen science programmes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and popular among those with an interest in natural history, but remain the domain of a relatively small portion of the public and heavily biased toward certain areas. Although systematic recording of biodiversity data has been practiced for centuries in the Global North, many tropi...

Background Several hundred butterfly species show some form of migratory behaviour. Here we identify how the methodologies available for studying butterfly migration have changed over time, and document geographic and taxonomic foci in the study of butterfly migration. Method We review publications on butterfly migration published in six languages...

Insects dominate the biosphere, driving ecosystem processes and functions that sustain humanity, yet insect populations are plummeting worldwide1. Massive conservation efforts will be needed to halt and reverse these declines2,3. Protected areas (PAs) could play a decisive role in safeguarding insect species from extinction4, but progress so far in...

Coastal wetlands around the world have been degraded by human activities. Global declines in the extent of important coastal wetlands, including mangroves, salt marshes, and tidal flats, necessitate mitigation and restoration efforts. However, some well‐meaning management actions, particularly mangrove afforestation, can inadvertently cause further...

A person’s health and wellbeing are contingent on the amount of social support that they receive. Similarly, experiencing nature has been shown to improve people’s health and wellbeing. However, we do not know how relationships between social cohesion, nature experiences and nature connection could interrelate and vary across different types of urb...

International policy is focused on increasing the proportion of the Earth’s surface that is protected for nature1,2. Although studies show that protected areas prevent habitat loss3–6, there is a lack of evidence for their effect on species’ populations: existing studies are at local scale or use simple designs that lack appropriate controls7–13. H...

Establishing marine reserves is particularly challenging in highly populated coastal areas where stakeholders compete for resources and space, such as the Mediterranean Sea. While large-scale conservation planning is useful, there is a need for finer-grained assessments at local and regional scales. Yet fine scale environmental and socioeconomic da...