Simon Linke

• PhD
• Griffith University

Passive acoustic recorders have emerged as powerful tools for ecological monitoring. However, effective monitoring is not simply an act of recording sounds. To have meaning for conservation and management, acoustic monitoring needs to be properly planned and analyzed to yield high quality information. Here, we provide a set of considerations for th...

Aquatic insects are a major indicator used to assess ecological condition in freshwater environments. However, current methods to collect and identify aquatic insects require advanced taxonomic expertise and rely on invasive techniques that lack spatio-temporal replication. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is emerging as a non-invasive complementa...

Monitoring the effect of ecosystem restoration can be difficult and time‐consuming. Autonomous sensors, such as acoustic recorders, can aid monitoring across long time scales. This project successfully developed, tested and implemented call recognisers for eight species of frog in the Murray–Darling Basin. Recognisers for all but one species perfor...

Monitoring the effect of ecosystem restoration can be difficult and time consuming. Autonomous sensors, such as acoustic recorders, can aid monitoring across long time scales. This project successfully developed, tested and implemented call recognisers for eight species of frog in the Murray-Darling Basin. Recognisers for all but one species perfor...

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...

Here we introduce the LakeATLAS dataset, which provides a broad range of hydro-environmental characteristics for more than 1.4 million lakes and reservoirs globally with an area of at least 10 ha. LakeATLAS forms part of the larger HydroATLAS data repository and expands the existing datasets of sub-basin and river reach descriptors by adding equiva...

Monitoring freshwater systems can prove difficult. Sampling regimes can influence outcomes by attracting or scaring target taxa and in extreme circumstances can injure the species. Ecoacoustics—an emerging discipline focusing on the ecological investigation of environmental sound—can overcome these difficulties and provide a continuous data stream...

Ecologists are increasingly using bioacoustics in wildlife monitoring programs. Remote autonomous sound recorders provide new options for collecting data for species and in contexts that were previously difficult. However, post-processing of sound files to extract relevant data remains a significant challenge. Detection algorithms, or call recogniz...

Freshwater systems are among the most endangered biomes globally. Drivers and pressures include an increased demand for food, energy and water, expansion of urban areas that leads to changes in hydrology and water chemistry, as well as climate change which acts as overarching threat interacting with multiple aspects of the ecosystem. According to t...

Sediment runoff from disturbed coastal catchments is a major threat to marine ecosystems. Understanding where sediments are produced and where they are delivered enables managers to design more effective strategies for improving water quality. A management strategy is targeted restoration of degraded terrestrial areas, as it provides opportunities...

• Although the network of national parks in Zambia offers a degree of protection for freshwater diversity, the protection status of numerous systems outside of these parks requires further action. The biodiversity associated with its freshwater systems, both lotic and lentic, is unique, covering a climatic gradient from tropical to subtropical acro...

Humanity is on a pathway of unsustainable loss of the natural systems upon which we, and all life, rely. To date, global efforts to achieve internationally-agreed goals to reduce carbon emissions, halt biodiversity loss, and retain essential ecosystem services, have been poorly integrated. However, these different goals all rely on preserving natur...

There is a growing recognition that conservation strategies should be designed accounting for cross-realm connections, such as freshwater connections to land and sea, to ensure effectiveness of marine spatial protection and minimize perverse outcomes of changing land-use. Yet, examples of integration across realms are relatively scarce, with most t...

The Nature Needs Half (NNH) movement aims to protect 50 % of the earth. That said protected area designation usually neglects freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity. We assessed protection of the surface area of lakes, length of river reaches, habitat area of fish and odonate species within the terrestrial-focused protected areas of Bhutan that mee...

The conservation movement “Nature Needs Half” (NNH) aims to protect 50% of the earth by 2050. But increase in total protected area (PA) coverage alone does not guarantee adequate species protection, and identifying conservation priority areas that meet specific species conservation targets is suggested as a way forward. Further, PAs are dynamic ent...

Freshwater ecoacoustics is an emerging field that involves underwater audio recordings to detect the presence, location, and density of species in noninvasive and unbiased ways. Conducted long-term, ecoacoustics provides information on biophysical changes and environmental patterns that can advance freshwater conservation. River Listening is an int...

• Understanding soundscapes, that is, the totality of sounds within a location, helps to assess nature in a more holistic way, providing a novel approach to investigating ecosystems. To date, very few studies have investigated freshwater soundscapes in their entirety and none across a broad spatial scale. • In this study, we recorded 12 freshwater...

• Passive acoustic monitoring is gaining momentum as a viable alternative method to surveying freshwater ecosystems. As part of an emerging field, the spatio-temporal replication levels of these sampling methods need to be standardised. However, in shallow waters, acoustic spatio-temporal patchiness remains virtually unexplored. • In this paper, we...

• Applications in bioacoustics and its sister discipline ecoacoustics have increased exponentially over the last decade. However, despite knowledge about aquatic bioacoustics dating back to the times of Aristotle and a vast amount of background literature to draw upon, freshwater applications of ecoacoustics have been lagging to date. • In this spe...

The HydroATLAS database provides a standardized compendium of descriptive hydro-environmental information for all watersheds and rivers of the world at high spatial resolution. Version 1.0 of HydroATLAS offers data for 56 variables, partitioned into 281 individual attributes and organized in six categories: hydrology; physiography; climate; land co...

Systematic conservation planning has contributed to the spatial design of reserve networks in river ecosystems by recognizing the importance of maintaining longitudinal connectivity. In the complex and dynamic landscapes of river-floodplain systems, however, it is still challenging to account for the longitudinal and, especially, lateral connection...

Biodiversity in freshwater habitats is decreasing faster than in any other type of environment, mostly as a result of human activities. Monitoring these losses can help guide mitigation efforts. In most studies, sampling strategies predominantly rely on collecting animal and vegetal specimens. Although these techniques produce valuable data, they a...

• Groundwater has very rarely been included in modern systematic conservation planning methods that identify key areas for protection of aquatic organisms. • Three conservation plans were developed for aquatic ecosystems in the Hunter Valley, NSW, Australia using the planning software Marxan: one model for rivers and wetlands and two that consider...

1.Groundwater has very rarely been included in modern systematic conservation planning methods that identify key areas for protection of aquatic organisms. 2.Three conservation plans were developed for aquatic ecosystems in the Hunter Valley, NSW, Australia using the planning software Marxan: one model for rivers and wetlands and two that consider...

Bhutan is recognized for conservation success under its pro‐environmental development philosophy Gross National Happiness (GNH). However, an increase in area coverage alone cannot track the true contribution of protected areas (PAs) to biodiversity conservation. Capturing PA dynamism by tracking PADDD (PA downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement)...

In this chapter we review techniques that managers may use to respond to climate change. First, modelling the impacts of climate change on freshwater ecosystems are discussed. While hydro-climatic projections can be used their imprecision requires the selection of robust adaptation options that provide benefits under a range of possible climate out...

• In many wetlands the timing and duration of inundation determine ecological characteristics and the provision of ecosystem services; however, wetland conservation decisions often rely on static maps of wetland boundaries that do not capture their dynamic hydrological variability and connectivity. • The Amazon River basin contains some of the worl...

• Globally, water abstraction for human consumption and irrigated agriculture leads to significant changes in aquatic ecosystems. To counter these detrimental effects, water releases—often termed environmental water allocations—restore overbank flow or are delivered to artificially disconnected wetlands. While a suite of monitoring methods is avail...

• Ecoacoustic methods are increasingly used to monitor the state of populations and ecosystems. In freshwater environments, they present the clear advantages of being non‐invasive, reducing bias, and providing continuous observations instead of only limited sampling snapshots in time. However, similar to standard bioassessment methods, temporal var...

Biodiversity in freshwater habitats is decreasing faster than in any other environment, mostly due to human activities. Monitoring these losses can help guide mitigation efforts. In most comparative or focal studies, sampling strategies predominantly rely on collecting animal and vegetal specimens. Although these techniques have produced valuable d...

Environmental water management has become a global imperative in response to environmental degradation and the growing recognition that human well-being and livelihoods are critically dependent on freshwater ecosystems and the ecological functions and services they provide. Although a wide range of techniques and strategies for planning and impleme...

Knowledge that can be gained from acoustic data collection in tropical ecosystems is low‐hanging fruit. There is every reason to record and with every day, there are fewer excuses not to do it. In recent years, the cost of acoustic recorders has decreased substantially (some can be purchased for under US$50, e.g., Hill et al. 2018) and the technolo...

• Integrating ecosystem services (ESs) in landscape planning can help to identify conservation opportunities by finding co‐benefits between biodiversity conservation and the maintenance of regulating and cultural ecosystem services. The adequate integration of ESs needs careful consideration of potential trade‐offs, however, especially between prov...

In managing various threats to biodiversity, it is important to prioritize multiple management actions and the levels of effort to apply. However, a spatial conservation prioritization framework that integrates these key aspects, and can be generalized, is still missing. Moreover, assessing the robustness of prioritization frameworks to uncertainty...

To be effective for freshwater biodiversity, conservation efforts must consider the particularities of these systems, such as the key role of spatial–temporal connectivity at maintaining ecological processes (e.g., periodic migrations or dispersal from refuge areas, gene flow, or transport of energy and matter essential for the persistence of popul...

In the face of the current extinction crisis and severely limited conservation resources, safeguarding the tree of life is increasingly recognized as a high priority. We conducted a first systematic global assessment of the conservation of phylogenetic diversity (PD) that uses realistic area targets and highlights the key areas for conservation of...

Migratory species depend on connected habitats and appropriate migratory cues to complete their life cycles. Diadromous fish exemplify species with migratory life cycles by moving between connected freshwater and saltwater habitats to reproduce. However, migration increases the exposure of fish to multiple threats and it is critical that managers i...

Systematic conservation planning has become a standard approach globally, but prioritization of conservation efforts hardly considers species traits in decision making. This can be important for species persistence and thus adequacy of the conservation plan. Here, we developed and validated a novel approach of incorporating trophic information into...

Almost all environmental management comes at an economic cost that may not be borne equitably by all stakeholders. Here, we investigate how heterogeneity in catch and profits among fishers influences the trade-off among the triple-bottom-line objectives of recovering a fish population, maximizing its economic value and distributing restrictions equ...

River Listening is an interdisciplinary research project exploring the cultural and biological diversity of global river systems through sound. The project examines the creative possibilities of accessible and noninvasive recording technologies to monitor river health and engage local communities in the conservation of global river systems. River L...

Wetlands have been extensively modified by human activities worldwide. We provide a global-scale portrait of the threats and protection status of the world's inland wetlands by combining a global map of inundation extent derived from satellite images with data on threats from human influence and on protected areas. Currently, seasonal inland wetlan...

Aim To assess how climate change may decouple the ecosystems used by a migratory fish, and how decoupling influences priorities for stream restoration. Location Australia. Methods We modelled changes in habitat suitability under climate change in both riverine and marine habitats for a threatened diadromous species, the Australian Grayling Protot...

The IUCN Red List is the most extensive source of conservation status assessments for species worldwide, but important gaps in coverage remain. Here we demonstrate the use of a spatial prioritization approach to efficiently prioritize species assessments to achieve increased and up-to-date coverage efficiently. We focus on freshwater fishes, which...

Predicting the consequences of climate change for biodiversity is critical to conservation efforts. Extensive range losses have been predicted for thousands of individual species, but less is known about how climate change might impact whole clades and landscape-scale patterns of biodiversity. Here, we show that climate change scenarios imply signi...

Protected areas are a cornerstone strategy for terrestrial and increasingly marine biodiversity conservation, but their use for conserving inland waters has received comparatively scant attention. In 2010, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) included a target of 17% protection for inland waters, yet there has been no meaningful way of meas...

In many intermittent, dryland rivers, fish are confined to isolated waterholes for much of the year. It is only during brief flow events, which typify the hydrology of these systems, that fish are able to move between waterholes and explore surrounding habitat. Because most of the river channel will dry afterwards, there is a strong advantage for s...

The Strategic Plan for Biodiversity (2011–2020), adopted at the 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, sets 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets to be met by 2020 to address biodiversity loss and ensure its sustainable and equitable use. Aichi Biodiversity Target 11 describes what an improved conservation...

Limited resources available for conservation require prioritizing location and level of conservation management efforts to abate threats to species. Ideally, the optimal level of management effort to allocate to an action should be informed by the species' responses to actions. This would enhance cost-effectiveness of conservation recommendations....

1. Declaring protected areas (PAs) stands out as one of the main conservation strategies worldwide and there are clear commitments to expand their extent under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD; Aichi targets for 2020). This conservation strategy has also received increasing attention in a freshwater context in the last tw...

Flagship species, especially mammals and birds, are commonly used to increase awareness of conservation issues in marine and terrestrial ecosystems. However, flagship species oriented programs are often ad hoc with initiatives scarce in the freshwater context. Here, we aim to identify potential flagship candidates that would appeal to a broad cross...

Declining water quality and ecological condition is a typical trend for rivers and streams worldwide as human demands for water resources increase. Managing these natural resources sustainably is a key responsibility of governments. Effective water management policies require information derived from long-term monitoring and evaluation. Biological...

Freshwater fish are one of the most diverse groups of vertebrates, but are also amongst the most threatened. With contributions from leaders in the field, this is the first assessment of the global state of freshwater fish diversity, synthesising the opportunities, challenges and barriers facing the conservation of freshwater fish biodiversity. The...

Freshwater ecosystems are among the most diverse environments on Earth but also one of the most degraded and threatened due mainly to the intense human modification and exploitation. Despite the increase in funds devoted to rehabilitation of these systems little success has been reported so far. When planning for rehabilitation of catchments, stake...

Maintaining spatial-temporal connectivity for conservation is necessary to allow the persistence of ecological processes and the biodiversity they sustain. However, conservation practice in human-modified environments can also benefit from prescribed disconnection through the implementation of barriers. Barriers, such as fences or dams, and buffer...

Planning for the remediation of multiple threats is crucial to ensure the long term persistence of biodiversity. Limited conservation budgets require prioritizing which management actions to implement and where. Systematic conservation planning traditionally assumes that all the threats in priority sites are abated (fixed prioritization approach)....

1. Recent advances in freshwater conservation planning allow addressing some of the specific needs of these systems. These include spatial connectivity or propagation of threats along stream networks, essential to ensure the maintenance of ecosystem processes and the biodiversity they sustain. However, these peculiarities make conservation recommen...

This book is available online at http://press.anu.edu.au

Aquifer ecosystems provide a range of important services including clean drinking water. These ecosystems, which are largely inaccessible to humans, comprise a distinct invertebrate fauna (stygofauna), which is characterized by narrow distributions, high levels of endemism and cryptic species. Although being under enormous anthropogenic pressure, a...

Although used in many jurisdictions around the world, analytical approaches of the Reference Condition Approach (RCA) to bioassessment of freshwater ecosystems have evolved quite slowly over the past 2 decades. For this special series of papers in Freshwater Science, researchers analyzed 3 data sets that included both benthic macroinvertebrate and...

Freshwater species around the world are facing higher rates of extinction than any other group. For many of these species very little is known about their current spatial distributions. How can we best design a system of Freshwater Protected Areas that represents both high biodiversity levels and rare species? Traditional methods to study distribut...

Conservation planning has historically been restricted to planning within single realms (i.e. marine, terrestrial or freshwater). Recently progress has been made in approaches for cross-realm planning which may enhance the ability to effectively manage processes that sustain biodiversity and ecosystem functions (e.g., connectivity) and thus minimiz...

Aim Presence‐only data represent a significant source of information for quantifying biodiversity distributions and provide opportunities for use in conservation planning. The large databases of presence‐only records that are available and the lower cost of acquisition could help overcome the traditional problem of lack of data for conservation. Ho...

River Listening is a practice-led research collaboration between independent artist Dr. Leah Barclay and the Australian Rivers Institute to explore new methods for acoustically monitoring three Queensland river systems: the Brisbane River, the Mary River and the Noosa River. The project involves the establishment of site-specific listening labs to...

Effective decision-making in conservation often is constrained by data quality. Uncertainties associated with poor quality or sparse data can lead to the misuse of limited resources and potentially the failure of conservation practice. Data acquisition, which can help improve decision-making, is constrained by limited budgets and time. This is espe...

Climate change represents a major challenge for conservation in the future and undermines protection within reserve boundaries. Freshwater biodiversity is still under‐represented within reserves world‐wide, and connectivity among reserves will become increasingly crucial if species are to persist under climate change. We tested the likely benefits...

Climate change and land‐use change are having substantial impacts on biodiversity world‐wide, but few studies have considered the impact of these factors together. If the combined effects of climate and land‐use change are greater than the effects of each threat individually, current conservation management strategies may be inefficient and/or inef...

When identifying conservation priorities, the accuracy of conservation assessments is constrained by the quality of data available. Despite previous efforts exploring how to deal with imperfect datasets, little is known about how data uncertainty translates into errors in conservation planning outcomes. Here, we evaluate the magnitude of commission...

F values & significant levels from ANOVA analyses for testing the effects of data addition, species uncertainty (AUC threshold) and their interaction on five different conservation planning performance measures. (DOCX)

Summary of environmental attributes selected from the Principal Component Analysis carried out on the whole set of environmental variables available (which explained 72% of the total variance in the dataset). (DOCX)

Summary of average and standard error (SE) of model performance indicators across different species and models. Results are presented separately for all the species common to all models (common in Table) and new species added when expanding the data set (new additions in Table). The performance of the true model is also showed. (DOCX)

The goals of this chapter are to provide an overview of established good practices in marine and freshwater conservation planning, highlight distinctive characteristics of marine and freshwater systems important for their conservation, and place these systems in the broader framework of conservation planning. We highlight elements of marine and fre...

Conservation adequacy is defined as the ability of conservation measures to sustain biodiversity. Although river network connectivity is important for maintaining key ecological processes and ensuring persistence of biodiversity, it also facilitates the propagation of threats along river networks, which may compromise the sustainability of freshwat...

Background/Question/Methods Climate change and land-use change are having devastating impacts on biodiversity worldwide, but few studies have considered the impact and possible interactions of these factors together. If the combined effects of climate and land-use change are greater than the effects of each threat individually, current conservati...

Assessing the ecological status of freshwater ecosystems has become an important topic as a first step towards improving their poor condition. Ecological status is usually measured as the deviation of observed conditions from expected reference conditions in the absence of human disturbances. The ability to produce objective evaluations depends lar...

The effects on benthic macroinvertebrate communities of simulated degradation of streams enabled evaluation of the effects of starting condition, type of degradation, and biota descriptor on the type 1 and type 2 error rates of bioassessment. Benthic macroinvertebrate communities from five reference streams in the Fraser River basin (British Columb...

Aim Recent efforts to apply the principles of systematic conservation planning to freshwater ecosystems have focused on the special connected nature of these systems as a way to ensure adequacy (long-term maintenance of biodiversity). Connectivity is important in maintaining biodiversity and key ecological processes in freshwater environments and i...

1. Owing to intensive human use, freshwaters are among the most seriously threatened and modified environments on the planet. Their poor condition and the risk to services that humans need from these ecosystems make their rehabilitation a priority. However, many previous studies have reported the poor performance of many rehabilitation activities....

implications but also often decreases in economic value, e.g. erosion removes fertile soils and reduces land productivity. Due to the high connectivity that characterises freshwater ecosystems these negative effects often extend beyond the directly degraded areas, commonly affecting the downstream river reaches, estuaries and coastal waters. In suc...

Abiotic and biologically informed classifications are often used in conservation planning as coarse-filter surrogates for species. The relationship between these surrogates and the distribution of species is commonly assumed, but rarely assessed by planners. We derived four abiotic and eight biologically informed classifications of stream reaches t...