Will F. Figueira

Will F. Figueira
The University of Sydney · School of Life and Environmental Sciences

PhD

About

111
Publications
47,935
Reads
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8,962
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2016 - October 2016
The University of Sydney
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
January 2009 - December 2015
The University of Sydney
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
January 2004 - January 2009
University of Technology, Sydney
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (111)
Article
Full-text available
Remote underwater videos (RUVs) are valuable for studying fish assemblages and behaviors, but analyzing them is time-consuming. To effectively extract data from RUVs while minimizing sampling errors, this study developed optimal subsampling strategies for assessing relative abundance, richness, and bite rates of corallivorous fish across eight geog...
Article
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The structural architecture of coral reefs is a known predictor of species richness, fish biomass and reef resilience. At a smaller scale, three-dimensional (3D) surface area of corals is a fundamental determinant of physical and biological processes. Quantifying the 3D surface area of corals has applications for a broad range of scientific discipl...
Article
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Wildlife conflicts require robust quantitative data on incidence and impacts, particularly among species of conservation and cultural concern. We apply a multi-assay framework to quantify predation in a southeastern Australian scenario where complex management implications and calls for predator culling have grown despite a paucity of data on seabi...
Article
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Change detection is an essential and widely used approach for investigating ecosystem dynamics. Multi-temporal 3D models increasingly underpin photogrammetry-based analyses of change for many ecologically relevant attributes. To detect change, it is necessary to accurately align 3D models collected at different times using a process referred to as...
Article
Foundation species are being restored into inherently variable landscapes with multiple, interspersed habitats. However, understanding of the influence of different neighbouring habitats on community assembly and the survival of restored species is limited, despite their significant potential to affect restoration outcomes. We tested how habitat‐se...
Article
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Emerging technology has immense potential to increase the scale and efficiency of marine conservation. One such technology is large‐area imaging (LAI), which relies on structure‐from‐motion photogrammetry to create composite products, including 3‐dimensional (3‐D) environmental models, that are larger in spatial extent than the individual images us...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This is a practical guide to the implementation of large-area imaging (LAI) for coral reef scientists. LAI refers to an approach to generate composite 3D (and derived 2D) image products from sequences of field-collected images using structure-from-motion (SfM) photogrammetry. Coral reef scientists conducting coral restoration, environmental mo...
Article
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Marine species, such as corals and kelp, are responding to climate change by altering their distributions. Microbial biofilms underpin key processes that affect the establishment, maintenance, and function of these dominant habitat-formers. Climate-mediated changes to microbial biofilms can therefore strongly influence species' range shifts. Here,...
Article
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Context Gamay is a coastal waterway of immense social, cultural and ecological value. Since European settlement, it has become a hub for industrialisation and human modification. There is growing desire for ecosystem-level management of urban waterways, but such efforts are often challenged by a lack of integrated knowledge. Aim and methods We sys...
Article
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Fishery impacts pose threats not only to target species, but also to bycatch species. Nevertheless, choosing priorities for conservation or research in fisheries is often driven by economic value and most retained bycatch species such as sharks and rays have been historically of low profit. Traditional stock assessments usually require large quanti...
Article
Background Assessing fish assemblages in subtidal and intertidal habitats is challenging due to the structural complexity of many of these systems. Trapping and collecting are regarded as optimal ways to sample these assemblages, but this method is costly and destructive, so researchers also use video techniques. Underwater visual census and baited...
Article
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As marine species adapt to climate change, their heat tolerance will likely be under strong selection. Yet trade-offs between heat tolerance and other life history traits could compromise natural adaptation or assisted evolution. This is particularly important for ecosystem engineers, such as reef-building corals, which support biodiversity yet are...
Technical Report
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The Australian Institute of Marine Science’s (AIMS) Ecological Intelligence for Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (EcoRRAP) quantifies natural rates of ecological and genetic reef recovery and adaptation in response to acute and chronic disturbances, as well as key environmental variables related to different coral reef communities. This info...
Book
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We systematically reviewed published literature, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and consulted with local scientists to synthesise all published knowledge of Gamay’s (Botany Bay, Sydney) aquatic ecosystem, identifying key knowledge gaps and future research opportunities for this urban waterway.
Article
Upside-down jellyfish (Cassiopea spp.) are predominantly tropical, but there have been recent reports of medusae in temperate environments. In 2017 they were recorded in temperate Lake Macquarie, Australia, where they have a tendency to disappear from this area through late winter (Austral, August). This raises questions about the role of temperatu...
Article
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High-latitude reefs are suboptimal coral habitats, but such habitats are increasingly considered to be potential refugia from climate change for range-shifting coral reef species. Notably, tropical reef fish have been observed along the south-east coast of Australia, but their establishment on temperate rocky reefs is currently limited by winter mi...
Article
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Habitat interactions play key roles in regulating biodiversity and ecosystem functions. This is particularly important in aquatic ecosystems, where the flow of water facilitates exchanges of energy and matter. Oyster reefs, a highly degraded habitat globally and a key focus for restoration efforts, can reduce water movement and facilitate the depos...
Article
Population characteristics (e.g., density and body sizes) of foundation species can affect their own persistence and provisioning of ecosystem functions. Understanding the drivers of population characteristics of foundation species at multiple spatial scales is therefore critical for maximizing ecosystem functions of restored habitats. We analyzed...
Article
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Upside-down jellyfish (Cassiopea sp.) are mostly sedentary, benthic jellyfish that have invaded estuarine ecosystems around the world. Monitoring the spread of this invasive jellyfish must contend with high spatial and temporal variability in abundance of individuals, especially around their invasion front. Here, we evaluated the utility of drones...
Article
Ecosystem restoration has been practiced for over a century and is increasingly supported by the emergent applied science of restoration ecology. A prerequisite for successful ecosystem restoration is determining meaningful and measurable goals. This requires tools to monitor success in a standardized way. Photogrammetry uses images to reconstruct...
Article
The United States of America, as most other countries, emphasizes commercial fisheries when reporting statistics to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and excludes data from other sectors, such as recreational fisheries. Our study is a first attempt to account comprehensively for all sources of total U.S. marine catc...
Article
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Rubble islands are dynamic sedimentary features present on reef platforms that evolve under a variety of morphodynamic processes and controlling mechanisms. They provide valuable inhabitable land for small island nations, critical habitat for numerous species, and are threatened by climate change. Aiming to investigate the controlling mechanisms di...
Article
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Interactions among selection, gene flow, and drift affect the trajectory of adaptive evolution. In natural populations, the direction and magnitude of these processes can be variable across different spatial, temporal, or ontogenetic scales. Consequently, variability in evolutionary processes affects the predictability or stochasticity of microevol...
Article
Climate change is promoting fast poleward expansion in many tropical marine fish species. With projected increases in sea surface temperatures, there is significant scope for increased range expansions in the future. However, the strength and consequences of density‐driven competitive interactions between vagrant and resident fishes are largely unk...
Article
Aim Climate change is redistributing species globally, resulting in altered community structures and ecosystem functioning. The current paradigm is that species should track temperature isoclines along latitudinal and depth gradients to remain within their thermal niches. However, the many exceptions to this rule point to complex ecological and env...
Article
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Bottom-dwelling elasmobranchs, such as guitarfishes, skates and stingrays are highly susceptible species to bycatch due to the overlap between their distribution and area of fishing operations. Catch data for this group is also often merged in generic categories preventing species-specific assessments. Along the east coast of Australia, the Eastern...
Article
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Climate change is altering the latitudinal distributions of species, with their capacity to keep pace with a shifting climate depending on the stochastic expression of population growth rates, and the influence of compensatory density feedback on age‐specific survival rates. We use population‐abundance time series at the leading edge of an expandin...
Article
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Sea‐level rise, storm surges, ageing and wear are forcing upgrades to breakwaters and sea walls to protect coastal areas from erosion and inundation. Such upgrades involve the introduction of new material which may consequently act as an ecological disturbance that can alter established marine communities and ecosystem function. Mitigating ecologic...
Article
Larval fish have been shown to vertically migrate with ontogeny, a behaviour that influences their dispersal by exposing the larvae to currents with different velocities at different stages of development. Most studies have focused on studying the vertical migration of tropical reef fishes, that have been shown in general to migrate downwards with...
Article
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This study describes diet and feeding habits of two common bycatch elasmobranchs in East Australia: The Eastern Fiddler Ray Trygonorrhina fasciata (Muller & Henle, 1841) and the Sydney Skate Dentiraja australis (Macleay, 1884). Using stomach content analysis, we describe diet composition, food preferences and trophic levels of these batoids. Crusta...
Article
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Adequately sampling benthic cover in marine ecosystems is a challenge with most methods encompassing only a small portion of the area for which cover is estimated. Recent advances in photogrammetric techniques are providing opportunity to map expansive areas of reef. This study aimed to evaluate the adequate level of sampling for traditional quadra...
Article
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Biogenic structures that persist post‐mortem are ubiquitous, but rarely considered as key ecological features. Post‐mortem structures in many ecological systems exert community‐level effects and thus the dynamics of their degradation (i.e. taphonomy) become important in affecting community functions and ecosystem services, and these often‐overlooke...
Article
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Environmental anomalies that trigger adverse physiological responses and mortality are occurring with increasing frequency due to climate change. At species' range peripheries, environmental anomalies are particularly concerning because species often exist at their environmental tolerance limits and may not be able to migrate to escape unfavourable...
Article
The Neolithic temples of Malta are among the oldest examples of prehistoric architecture, yet the construction of their roofs remains a mystery. The absence of any roofs or roofing material at the temple sites has resulted in conjecture regarding the original appearance of these megalithic structures. The most valuable indications of prehistoric Ma...
Article
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The effect of temperature on predator–prey dynamics has the potential to be an important factor regulating ecological interactions and is becoming increasingly common due to climate-change-driven range shifts and species introductions. Here, we use mesocosm experiments to evaluate the thermal sensitivity of burst swimming (a proxy for prey escape a...
Article
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To effectively balance the need to forage against the need to avoid predation, animals should utilize information from both their physical and social environments. However, most studies have considered these factors in isolation and few have investigated how animals change the use of these cues temporally. Using novel 3D modeling of the environment...
Article
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Scleractinian corals often exhibit high levels of morphological plasticity, which is potentially important in enabling individual species to occupy benthic spaces across a wide range of environmental gradients. This study tested for differences in the three-dimensional (3D) geometry of three branching corals, Acropora nasuta, Pocillopora spp. and S...
Article
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Climate change is leading to shifts in species geographical distributions, but populations are also probably adapting to environmental change at different rates across their range. Owing to a lack of natural and empirical data on the influence of phenotypic adaptation on range shifts of marine species, we provide a general conceptual model for unde...
Conference Paper
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Fishing is a major human disturbance to marine communities on temperate rocky reefs. The Hawkesbury bioregion, on the east coast of Australia, has one of the highest human population densities in the country, and a correspondingly-high level of fishing impact. The region also contains ten small Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), most of which are open...
Article
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Temperature fluctuations have caused considerable biological and ecological impacts on marine organisms and their communities. For example, increased temperatures in sub-tropical environments have led to the influx of tropical “vagrant” marine species into cooler temperate waters in a phenomenon called ‘tropicalisation’. Here we combine metabolic p...
Presentation
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Introduction Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are a key management tool for the conservation of biodiversity and restoration of marine communities. While large, well-designed and enforced MPAs have been found to be effective, most MPAs are small with various levels of protection, and the conservation effectiveness of such MPAs varies. This study asses...
Preprint
Effective conservation planning requires biotic data across an entire region. In data-poor ecosystems conservation planning is informed by using environmental surrogates (e.g. temperature) predominantly in two ways: to develop habitat classification schemes (1) or develop species distribution models (2). We test the utility of both approaches for c...
Article
Full-text available
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are a key management tool for the conservation of biodiversity and restoration of marine communities. While large, well-designed and enforced MPAs have been found to be effective, results from small MPAs vary. The Hawkesbury Shelf, a coastal bioregion in New South Wales, Australia, has ten small, near-shore MPAs known...
Article
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Anthropogenic structures are increasingly common in natural environments and present novel habitats for resident organisms. Marine breakwalls are similar to natural reefs in that they also provide habitat for diverse assemblages of mobile animals. However, it is unclear if fish assemblages on these artificial structures differ from those on neighbo...
Article
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Complex life cycles may evolve to dissociate distinct developmental phases in an organism's lifetime. However, genetic or environmental factors may restrict trait independence across life stages, constraining ontogenetic trajectories. Quantifying covariance across life stages and their temporal variability is fundamental in understanding life‐histo...
Article
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Infrastructure is increasingly being built in marine habitats, with extensive ecological consequences for benthic and fish assemblages alike. The practice of ecological engineering attempts to mitigate the negative impacts of infrastructure through the design of artificial structures that benefit both humans and nature. Although research has primar...
Article
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Marine protected areas (MPAs) are designed to reduce threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning from anthropogenic activities. Assessment of MPAs effectiveness requires synchronous sampling of protected and non-protected areas at multiple spatial and temporal scales. We used an autonomous underwater vehicle to map benthic communities in repl...
Article
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An 18-year database of coral reef fish expatriation poleward in South East Australia was used to estimate persistence of coal reef fish recruits on temperate reefs. Surveys have identified over 150 coral reef fish species recruiting to temperate reefs at latitudes of 34°S (Sydney) and 60 species to 37°S (Merimbula) with 20 and 5 species respectivel...
Article
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Growth and contraction of ecosystem engineers, such as trees, influence ecosystem structure and function. On coral reefs, methods to measure small changes in the structure of microhabitats, driven by growth of coral colonies and contraction of skeletons, are extremely limited. We used 3D reconstructions to quantify changes in the external structure...
Article
Habitat structural complexity influences biotic diversity and abundance, but its influence on marine ecosystems has not been widely addressed. Recent advances in computer vision and robotics allow quantification of structural complexity at higher-resolutions than previously achieved. This provides an important opportunity to determine the ecologica...
Article
Habitat structural complexity is one of the most important factors in determining the makeup of biological communities. Recent advances in structure-from-motion and photogrammetry have resulted in a proliferation of 3D digital representations of habitats from which structural complexity can be measured. Little attention has been paid to quantifying...
Article
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Increasingly, urbanised coastlines are being armoured by shoreline protection structures, such as seawalls. Seawalls typically lack the complex microhabitats and protective spaces of natural shorelines and consequently organisms that settle on them may be particularly susceptible to predation. We tested whether the addition of complex microhabitats...
Article
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Top predator populations, once intensively hunted, are rebounding in size and geographic distribution. The cessation of sealing along coastal Australia and subsequent recovery of Australian Arctocephalus pusillus doriferus and long-nosed A. forsteri fur seals represents a unique opportunity to investigate trophic linkages at a frontier of predator...
Article
During 2015-2016, record temperatures triggered a pan-tropical episode of coral bleaching, the third global-scale event since mass bleaching was first documented in the 1980s. Here we examine how and why the severity of recurrent major bleaching events has varied at multiple scales, using aerial and underwater surveys of Australian reefs combined w...
Article
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Scientific Data 2:150057 doi: 10.1038/sdata.2015.57 (2015); Published 27 Oct 2015; Updated 20 Dec 2016 The authors regret that Ezequiel Marzinelli was omitted in error from the author list of the original version of this Data Descriptor.
Chapter
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Accurate historical data are useful for fisheries management and monitoring long-term changes in marine ecosystems. However, official catch statistics typically only include landings data from commercial fisheries and do not include other important sources of catch such as recreational fisheries, discards, or illegal fishing. Here, we estimate the...
Article
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Successful marine management relies on understanding patterns of human use. However, obtaining data can be difficult and expensive given the widespread and variable nature of activities conducted. Remote camera systems are increasingly used to overcome cost limitations of conventional labour-intensive methods. Still, most systems face trade-offs be...
Article
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While the consequences of bioinvasions are becoming clearer, our understanding of the environmental and ecological factors driving them is limited due to the complexity of the invasion process. Invasion success can be considered to be influenced by characteristics of the receiving assemblage (habitat, food, community interactions) and disturbances....
Article
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Habitat structural complexity is a key factor shaping marine communities. However, accurate methods for quantifying structural complexity underwater are currently lacking. Loss of structural complexity is linked to ecosystem declines in biodiversity and resilience. We developed new methods using underwater stereo-imagery spanning four years (2010-2...