Saving our national icon: An ecological analysis of the 2011 Australian Senate inquiry into status o
Shumway, N., D. Lunney, L. Seabrook, and C. McAlpine. 2015. Saving our national icon: An ecological analysis of the 2011 Australian Senate inquiry into status of the koala. Environmental Science & Policy 54:297-303. Highlights • Public submissions to the Australian Senate inquiry into the status of the koala were reviewed. • Three concerns stood out: habitat clearing, ineffective policies, and infrastructure development. • Results were compared to Senate Inquiry report and its recommendations. • Results suggest the Senate report recommendations were inaccurate and spatially bias. • Key implications for species conservation policy discussed in conclusions. Download a PDF copy of the paper Rea
Tulloch, A.I.T., Barnes, M., Ringma, J., Fuller, R.A. and J. E.M. Watson (2015). Understanding the importance of small patches of habitat for conservation. Journal of Applied Ecology, 53: 418-429. We demonstrate a simple multi-pronged metric for assessing ecosystem vulnerability, which can potentially improve current methods of ecosystem assessment (e.g. the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems) by considering the size and configuration of remaining patches as well as overall loss. Our approach is the first to explore the consequences of small-scale vegetation clearing due to the failure of current policies to protect vegetation patches smaller than a given threshold.The main findings of our research