A Comprehensive Overview of Technologies for Species and Habitat Monitoring and Conservation.

The range of technologies currently used in biodiversity conservation is staggering, with innovative uses often adopted from other disciplines and being trialed in the field. We provide the first comprehensive overview of the current (2020) landscape of conservation technology, encompassing technologies for monitoring wildlife and habitats, as well as for on-the-ground conservation management (e.g.

Insectivorous bats are less active near freeways.

Traffic disturbances (i.e. pollution, light, noise, and vibrations) often extend into the area surrounding a road creating a 'road-effect zone'.

Managing uncertainty in movement knowledge for environmental decisions.

Species' movements affect their response to environmental change but movement knowledge is often highly uncertain. We now have well-established methods to integrate movement knowledge into conservation practice but still lack a framework to deal with uncertainty in movement knowledge for environmental decisions. We provide a framework that distinguishes two dimensions of species' movement that are heavily influenced by uncertainty: about movement and of movement to environmental decisions.

Forecasting species range dynamics with process-explicit models: matching methods to applications.

Knowing where species occur is fundamental to many ecological and environmental applications. Species distribution models (SDMs) are typically based on correlations between species occurrence data and environmental predictors, with ecological processes captured only implicitly. However, there is a growing interest in approaches that explicitly model processes such as physiology, dispersal, demography and biotic interactions.

Spatially explicit power analysis for detecting occupancy trends for multiple species.

Assessing the statistical power to detect changes in wildlife populations is a crucial yet often overlooked step when designing and evaluating monitoring programs. Here, we developed a simulation framework to perform spatially explicit statistical power analysis of biological monitoring programs for detecting temporal trends in occupancy for multiple species. Using raster layers representing the spatial variation in current occupancy and species-level detectability for one or multiple observation methods, our framework simulates changes in occupancy over space and time, with the capacity to explicitly model stochastic disturbances at monitoring sites (i.

Inferring species richness using multispecies occupancy modeling: Estimation performance and interpretation.

Multispecies occupancy models can estimate species richness from spatially replicated multispecies detection/non-detection survey data, while accounting for imperfect detection. A model extension using data augmentation allows inferring the number of species in the community, including those completely missed by sampling (i.e.

Little evidence of a road-effect zone for nocturnal, flying insects.

Roads and traffic may be contributing to global declines of insect populations. The ecological effects of roads often extend far into the surrounding habitat, over a distance known as the road-effect zone. The quality of habitat in the road-effect zone is generally degraded (e.

Correction: Occupancy and detectability modelling of vertebrates in northern Australia using multiple sampling methods.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Occupancy and detectability modelling of vertebrates in northern Australia using multiple sampling methods.

Understanding where species occur and how difficult they are to detect during surveys is crucial for designing and evaluating monitoring programs, and has broader applications for conservation planning and management. In this study, we modelled occupancy and the effectiveness of six sampling methods at detecting vertebrates across the Top End of northern Australia. We fitted occupancy-detection models to 136 species (83 birds, 33 reptiles, 20 mammals) of 242 recorded during surveys of 333 sites in eight conservation reserves between 2011 and 2016.

Bringing It All Together: Multi-species Integrated Population Modelling of a Breeding Community.

Unlabelled: Integrated population models (IPMs) combine data on different aspects of demography with time-series of population abundance. IPMs are becoming increasingly popular in the study of wildlife populations, but their application has largely been restricted to the analysis of single species. However, species exist within communities: sympatric species are exposed to the same abiotic environment, which may generate synchrony in the fluctuations of their demographic parameters over time.

Deep-sea diversity patterns are shaped by energy availability.

The deep ocean is the largest and least-explored ecosystem on Earth, and a uniquely energy-poor environment. The distribution, drivers and origins of deep-sea biodiversity remain unknown at global scales. Here we analyse a database of more than 165,000 distribution records of Ophiuroidea (brittle stars), a dominant component of sea-floor fauna, and find patterns of biodiversity unlike known terrestrial or coastal marine realms.

Statistical approaches to account for false-positive errors in environmental DNA samples.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling is prone to both false-positive and false-negative errors. We review statistical methods to account for such errors in the analysis of eDNA data and use simulations to compare the performance of different modelling approaches. Our simulations illustrate that even low false-positive rates can produce biased estimates of occupancy and detectability.

Guidelines for Using Movement Science to Inform Biodiversity Policy.

Substantial advances have been made in our understanding of the movement of species, including processes such as dispersal and migration. This knowledge has the potential to improve decisions about biodiversity policy and management, but it can be difficult for decision makers to readily access and integrate the growing body of movement science. This is, in part, due to a lack of synthesis of information that is sufficiently contextualized for a policy audience.

Ignoring imperfect detection in biological surveys is dangerous: a response to 'fitting and interpreting occupancy models'.

In a recent paper, Welsh, Lindenmayer and Donnelly (WLD) question the usefulness of models that estimate species occupancy while accounting for detectability. WLD claim that these models are difficult to fit and argue that disregarding detectability can be better than trying to adjust for it. We think that this conclusion and subsequent recommendations are not well founded and may negatively impact the quality of statistical inference in ecology and related management decisions.

Minimizing the cost of keeping options open for conservation in a changing climate.

Policy documents advocate that managers should keep their options open while planning to protect coastal ecosystems from climate-change impacts. However, the actual costs and benefits of maintaining flexibility remain largely unexplored, and alternative approaches for decision making under uncertainty may lead to better joint outcomes for conservation and other societal goals. For example, keeping options open for coastal ecosystems incurs opportunity costs for developers.

Breeding together: modeling synchrony in productivity in a seabird community.

With environmental conditions changing rapidly, there is a need to move beyond single-species models and consider how communities respond to environmental drivers. We present a modeling approach that allows estimation of multispecies synchrony in productivity, or its components, and the contribution of environmental covariates as synchronizing and desynchronizing agents. We apply the model to long-term breeding success data for five seabird species at a North Atlantic colony.

Population status of a cryptic top predator: an island-wide assessment of tigers in Sumatran rainforests.

Large carnivores living in tropical rainforests are under immense pressure from the rapid conversion of their habitat. In response, millions of dollars are spent on conserving these species. However, the cost-effectiveness of such investments is poorly understood and this is largely because the requisite population estimates are difficult to achieve at appropriate spatial scales for these secretive species.