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Introduction
Stephen Garnett is globally recognised in three areas - conservation management, the importance of the equitable involvement of Indigenous Peoples to conservation; and the governance of taxonomic lists. In the field of taxonomy, he has made substantial contributions to the development of guidelines for transparent and collaborative governance of taxonomic lists, with the aim of ensuring that global taxonomic lists have the highest levels of reliability and accuracy.
Additional affiliations
January 2005 - December 2012
Publications
Publications (543)
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...
Most conservation programs and laws aim to prevent extinction. However, there is a gulf between such aspirations and the current reality of escalating biodiversity loss. This review focuses on efforts to prevent extinctions in Australia, but much of this consideration is likely to apply globally. As context, we consider the reasons for trying to pr...
Heat is a global public health risk which kills many people every year. This is true even in temperate climates like that of Europe which has experienced an increasing number of intense heatwaves in the last decade. This study uses a unique dataset of more than 57,000 X (formerly Twitter) conversations from users in Germany about heatwaves over the...
Biological invasions are a growing challenge in a highly interconnected and globalized world, leading to the loss of native biodiversity. Indigenous peoples’ lands (IPLs) play a vital role in biodiversity conservation through activities such as land stewardship and management practices. Similar to protected areas, they are also often remote, with f...
Land use is a key driver of the ongoing biodiversity crisis and therefore also a major opportunity for its miti-gation. However, appropriately considering the diversity of land-use actors and activities in conservation assessments and planning is challenging. As a result, top-down conservation policy and planning are often criticized for a lack of...
Migratory animals can carry symbionts over long distances. While well-studied for parasite and pathogen transmission, less is known about use of this route by other symbiotic taxa, particularly those non-pathogenic. Here we ask the question of whether gut bacteria can be spread between continents by long-distance bird migration, although gut microb...
Most biodiversity monitoring globally tends to concentrate on trends in species’ populations and ranges rather than on threats and their management. Here we review the estimated impact of threats and the extent to which their management is understood and implemented for all threats to all Australian threatened bird taxa. The assessment reports the...
There are many impediments to conserving threatened birds. Some can be overcome through concerted action across multiple species while others require species-specific research and intensive management. We assess the feasibility of managing 202 threats identified in the Action Plan for Australian Birds across 217 Australian threatened bird taxa agai...
Environmental crises, such as wildfires, can cause major losses of human life, infrastructure, biodiversity, and cultural values. In many such situations, incident controllers must make fateful choices about what to protect—and hence what to abandon. With an online representative survey of >2000 adult Australians, we investigated social attitudes t...
Reducing extinction risk is a common aim of threatened species management. However, over the period 1990 to 2020, extinction risk was recently assessed as having declined in only 25 out of the 199 Australian bird taxa eligible for assessment. Here we analyse patterns that emerge from these taxa. Some of these improvements may be only temporary; the...
Australia recently committed through the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) to halt human-induced extinction of known threatened species and to reduce extinction risk of threatened species significantly by 2030. We review recent trends in extinction risk of Australian birds to provide context for current and future conservation ef...
Over 750 native bird species reside in or regularly migrate to Australia, many of which have experienced rapid changes in habitat extent over the past two centuries. By 2020, eight taxa were considered Extinct and 10% threatened with extinction. Understanding the underlying extrinsic and intrinsic factors that increase extinction risk can allow pri...
Monitoring is vital to conservation, enabling conservation scientists to detect population declines, identify threats and measure the effectiveness of interventions. However, not all threatened taxa are monitored, monitoring quality is variable, and the various components of monitoring are likely to differ in their rates of improvement over time. W...
Many Australian animal species are threatened by introduced species, and some by problematic native species. Conservation programs resulting in a network of havens (islands and fenced mainland areas free of introduced predators) have successfully reduced extinction risks for many threatened mammal taxa susceptible to introduced predators. However,...
Indigenous and traditional practices based on ethnoecological knowledge are fundamental to biodiversity stewardship and sustainable use.
Knowledge partnerships between Indigenous Peoples, traditional local communities, and ecologists can produce richer and fairer understandings of nature.
We identify key topical areas where such collaborations can...
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 f...
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...
Using the results of tracking 27 cranes captured in 1998, 2001 and 2015, we examine mortality in the Southeast Asian Population of Eastern Sarus Cranes (Grus antigone sharpii). Satellite transmitters were placed on 17 cranes, representing 8 family groups and the remaining cranes were only ringed. Movements between rainy and dry season habitats were...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 the...
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...