Stephen T Garnett

Charles Darwin University | CDU · Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods

Taxonomic data are a scientific common. Unlike nomenclature, which has strong governance institutions, there are currently no generally accepted governance institutions for the compilation of taxonomic data into an accepted global list. This gap results in challenges for conservation, ecological research, policymaking, international trade, and othe...

Indigenous Peoples are long‐term custodians of their lands, but only recently are their contributions to conservation starting to be recognized in biodiversity policy and practice. Tropical forest loss and degradation are lower in Indigenous lands than unprotected areas, yet the role of Indigenous Peoples' Lands (IPL) in biodiversity conservation h...

Australia's biota is species rich, with high rates of endemism. This natural legacy has rapidly diminished since European colonization. The impacts of invasive species, habitat loss, altered fire regimes, and changed water flows are now compounded by climate change, particularly through extreme drought, heat, wildfire, and flooding. Extinction rate...

Background The granivorous finches of Australia’s tropical savannas heavily rely on a sequence of perennial and annual grass seed production to feed throughout the year. An increase in late dry season wildfires has been suggested to detrimentally effect seed production sequence and has been attributed to poor physiological condition and a reduction...

Indigenous Peoples are custodians of many of the world’s least-exploited natural areas. These places of local and global socio-ecological importance face significant threats from industrial development expansion, but the risk of conversion of these lands remains unclear. Here we combine global datasets of Indigenous Peoples’ lands, their current ec...

Social media is widely used in emergencies, but the nature of the communication is poorly understood. We employed unsupervised topic modelling and sentiment analysis to analyse more than 80,000 Twitter tweets posted by users in Australia over a six-month period before, during and after the severe bushfires in 2019-2020, dubbed the 'Black Summer'. W...

The interaction between environmental stressors may be a greater threat to biota than any individual ecological threat on its own. Land-use change and inappropriate fire regimes are known to pose great challenges to biodiversity conservation worldwide. Despite much research being conducted into their singular impacts on ecosystems, very few have in...

Tropical and subtropical dry woodlands are rich in biodiversity and carbon. Yet, many of these woodlands are under high deforestation pressure and remain weakly protected. Here, we assessed how deforestation dynamics relate to areas of woodland protection and to conservation priorities across the world's tropical dry woodlands. Specifically, we cha...

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...

Background The coastal floodplains of northern Australia are fire-prone, but the impact of fire on floodplain biota is not well understood. Aims In this study, we sought to characterise the fire history of six adjacent floodplains in coastal Northern Territory, Australia. Methods We built a fine-scale 31-year fire history (1988–2018) to compare fir...

Catastrophic megafires can increase extinction risks; identifying species priorities for management and policy support is critical for preparing and responding to future fires. However, empirical data on population loss and recovery post-fire, especially megafire, are limited and taxonomically biased. These gaps could be bridged if species' morphol...

Natural hazards can turn into disasters when not managed well. An important part of disaster risk reduction is to understand how well communities are prepared for natural hazards and how well they can cope with and recover from shocks in the long-term. In this study we assess self-reported community resilience and ask what makes a community resilie...

Biodiversity is in chronic decline, and extreme events – such as wildfires – can add further episodes of acute losses. Fires of increasing magnitude will often overwhelm response capacity, and decision-makers need to make choices about what to protect. Conventionally, such choices prioritise human life then infrastructure then biodiversity. Based o...

We conducted a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed full text articles on the nexus between human mobility and drought or heat published between 2001 and 2021, inclusive. We identified 387 relevant articles, all of which were analysed descriptively using a dictionary-based approach and by using an unsupervised machine learning-based Latent...

The Golden-shouldered Parrot (GSP) Psephotellus chrysopterygius (Gould, 1857) is a distinctive threatened species that is endemic to Cape York Peninsula (CYP), and a totem for First Nations Peoples. Its distribution has contracted since European occupation. We trawl the literature and public and private archives to provide a definitive set of histo...

The Golden-shouldered Parrot (GSP) Psephotellus chrysopterygius (Gould, 1857) is a distinctive threatened species that is endemic to Cape York Peninsula (CYP), and a totem for First Nations Peoples. Its distribution has contracted since European occupation. We trawl the literature and public and private archives to provide a definitive set of histo...

Government conservation measures will always depend on public support. While more has been learnt about which species the public values and which conservation measures are socially acceptable, less is known about the criteria that the public thinks government should consider when making conservation investment decisions. This study uses a stated pr...

Working paper analysing the economic implications of the proposed 30% target for areal protection in the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework

Agricultural intensification, an increase in per-area productivity, may spare forests otherwise lost to agricultural expansion. Yet which conditions enable such sparing or whether intensification amplifies deforestation through rebound effects remains hotly debated. Using a multilevel Bayesian regression framework, we analyse the effects of agricul...

To understand the breeding habitat requirements of the small, highly threatened migratory population of Eastern Sarus Crane (Grus antigone sharpii) in Cambodia and Vietnam, we assessed nest site selection at two different spatial scales: at the scale of individually occupied wetlands within the deciduous dipterocarp forests of Kulen Promtep and Che...

Huge volumes of a diverse range of minerals are required to shift the world to renewable energy. An analysis now shows that many of these are being sourced from the lands of vulnerable people.

Poor farmers are particularly vulnerable to environmental stressors and often rely on traditional knowledge and grassroots creativity to help them to adapt. Such adaptation can be enhanced using other knowledge sources, but this requires greater understanding of the processes of knowledge co-production among scientists, local communities and state...

While the imminent extinction of many species is predicted, prevention is expensive, and decision-makers often have to prioritise funding. In democracies, it can be argued that conservation using public funds should be influenced by the values placed on threatened species by the public, and that community views should also affect the conservation m...

Many global and national conservation initiatives have objectives relating to reducing or reversing the rate of biodiversity decline but few have specific targets. In 2015, the Australian Government implemented a Threatened Species Strategy that aimed to improve the population trajectory of a set of 71 species (20 mammals, 21 birds and 30 plants) b...

Effective incentive programs for farmers to conserve biodiversity on their properties are vital for sustainability. Most such programs have focussed on natural areas, like revegetating waterways, but novel agricultural habitats amplify the commitment required of farmers and the need for collaboration in the conservation process. The rice fields of...

Monitoring is critical to gauge the effect of environmental management interventions as well as to measure the effects of human disturbances such as climate change. Recognition of the critical need for monitoring means that, at irregular intervals, recommendations are made for new government-instigated programs or to revamp existing ones. Using ins...

The habitats of Nepal's endangered red pandas provide ecosystem goods and services to surrounding human communities. Here, to help reduce pressure on the panda, we quantified the current use of the most important ecosystem goods and services obtained in and around a protected area in western Nepal, trends over the last 20 years, and factors driving...

Primates, represented by 521 species, are distributed across 91 countries primarily in the Neotropic, Afrotropic, and Indo-Malayan realms. Primates inhabit a wide range of habitats and play critical roles in sustaining healthy ecosystems that benefit human and nonhuman communities. Approximately 68% of primate species are threatened with extinction...

Globally, the use of agricultural fields by waterbirds has increased, resulting in conflicts with farmers. Designing effective management strategies to resolve these conflicts requires understanding the species' resource use. Dietary analyses can shed light on the extent of consumption of agricultural crops and surrounding natural resources, as wel...

Estimating trends in population size is critical for understanding population status and assessing the success of management interventions. Visual counts of birds as they congregate around predictable locations, such as waterholes, is a popular technique for estimating population size. Bird counts are used as a proxy for abundance, but how the rela...

The delineation of subspecies is important in the evaluation and protection of biodiversity. Subspecies delineation is hampered by inconsistently applied criteria and a lack of agreement and shifting standards on how a subspecies should be defined. The Australian endemic Yellow Chat (Epthianura crocea) is split into three subspecies (E. c. crocea,...

Negative interactions between waterbirds and people are increasing. Waterbirds feeding on agricultural crops cause significant losses to farmers worldwide, but so far most research to address these conflicts has been conducted on migratory species in the temperate northern hemisphere. We investigated the space use and habitat selection of the magpi...

Ecological niche theory dictates that sympatric species cannot occupy the same ecological niche at the same time. Sympatric granivorous finch species in tropical savannas appear to contradict this theory by moving in mixed‐species flocks and feeding together upon the same resources. Here, we explored this contradiction by tracking individuals from...

The likelihood of extinction within the next 20 years was determined for 47 Australian mammal, bird, reptile, frog and freshwater fish taxa previously identified as being highly imperilled. A 14-member expert elicitation panel, consisting of a mix of taxon experts and government managers of threatened species, estimated that there was a > 50% chanc...

Wildlife‐friendly produce shows promise in addressing the disconnect between consumers' choices and the loss of biodiversity from agriculture. However, the scope of programs and their contribution to conservation remain limited. An improved understanding of specific markets, combined with auspicious scenarios, could address this. In Australia's Mur...

Housing construction and operating costs can be reduced if building codes are designed to meet local expectations of thermal comfort ─ expectations that can vary across cultures and climates. We analysed the energy and thermal comfort performance of 38 recently-built houses in the tropical savanna (Aw) climate of Darwin, Northern Territory, Austral...

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...

Aim Introduced predators negatively impact biodiversity globally, with insular fauna often most severely affected. Here, we assess spatial variation in the number of terrestrial vertebrates (excluding amphibians) killed by two mammalian mesopredators introduced to Australia, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and feral cat (Felis catus). We aim to identif...

Aim After environmental disasters, species with large population losses may need urgent protection to prevent extinction and support recovery. Following the 2019–2020 Australian megafires, we estimated population losses and recovery in fire‐affected fauna, to inform conservation status assessments and management. Location Temperate and subtropical...

Knowledge of where a threatened species occurs in a landscape is crucial for determining its habitat requirements and informing its conservation planning and management. We conducted the first broad-scale survey of the Endangered Alligator Rivers Yellow Chat Epthianura crocea tunneyi across much of its known range on drying coastal floodplains in n...

Mountain ecosystems in western Nepal provide critical habitats for the endangered red panda. These habitats also need to satisfy the daily livelihood requirements of local communities. High levels of resource dependence and unsustainable resource use are creating pressure on the provision of ecosystem services in the region. Understanding the views...

Habitat loss is driving the extirpation of fauna across Earth. Many species are now absent from vast areas where they once occurred in inhabited continents, yet we do not have a good understanding of the extent to which different species have been extirpated, nor the degree to which range contractions and habitat loss has contributed to this local...

Human mobility is increasingly associated with environmental and climatic factors. One way to explore how mobility and the environment are linked is to review the research on different aspects of the topic. However, so many relevant articles are published that analysis of the literature using conventional techniques is becoming prohibitively arduou...

Improved governance of natural resource use is critical to the sustainability and maintenance of environmental quality. In western Nepal, unsustainable resource extraction is seen by the local community as a major threat to forest sustainability. While most respondents to a survey of 243 households inside and outside a protected area (PA) thought t...

With the intention of securing industry-free land and seascapes, protecting 'wilderness' entered international policy as a formal target for the first time in the zero-draft of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Given this increased prominence in international policy, it is timely to consider t...

Indigenous Peoples’ (IP) stewardship has helped conserve biodiversity and maintain healthy ecosystems worldwide. Among many challenges to this role are mounting pressures from industrial development. By assessing the current ecological condition of Indigenous lands with their potential for future industrial development, we show that the ecological...

Indigenous Peoples’ (IP) stewardship has helped conserve biodiversity and maintain healthy ecosystems worldwide. Among many challenges to this role are mounting pressures from industrial development. By assessing the current ecological condition of Indigenous lands with their potential for future industrial development, we show that the ecological...

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.