Emergency Response to Australia's Black Summer 2019-2020: The Role of a Zoo-Based Conservation Organisation in Wildlife Triage, Rescue, and Resilience for the Future.

Modern zoos are increasingly taking a leading role in emergency management and wildlife recovery. In the face of climate change and the predicted increase in frequency and magnitude of catastrophic events, zoos provide specialised expertise to assist wildlife welfare and endangered species recovery. In the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season, now called Australia's Black Summer, a state government-directed response was developed, assembling specialised individuals and organisations from government, non-government organisations, research institutions, and others.

Measuring continuous compositional change using decline and decay in zeta diversity.

Incidence, or compositional, matrices are generated for a broad range of research applications in biology. Zeta diversity provides a common currency and conceptual framework that links incidence-based metrics with multiple patterns of interest in biology, ecology, and biodiversity science. It quantifies the variation in species (or OTU) composition of multiple assemblages (or cases) in space or time, to capture the contribution of the full suite of narrow, intermediate, and wide-ranging species to biotic heterogeneity.

A bust but no boom: responses of floodplain bird assemblages during and after prolonged drought.

Climate change alters the frequency and severity of extreme events, such as drought. Such events will be increasingly important in shaping communities as climate change intensifies. The ability of species to withstand extreme events (resistance) and to recover once adverse conditions abate (resilience) will determine their persistence.

The effects of climate change and land-use change on demographic rates and population viability.

Understanding the processes that lead to species extinctions is vital for lessening pressures on biodiversity. While species diversity, presence and abundance are most commonly used to measure the effects of human pressures, demographic responses give a more proximal indication of how pressures affect population viability and contribute to extinction risk. We reviewed how demographic rates are affected by the major anthropogenic pressures, changed landscape condition caused by human land use, and climate change.

Native bird breeding in a chronosequence of revegetated sites.

Restoration of degraded landscapes through replantings of native vegetation has been proceeding in response to habitat loss and fragmentation and plummeting biodiversity. Little is known about whether the investments in ecological restoration have resulted in biodiversity benefits. We evaluated the potential of restored sites to support populations by assessing bird breeding activity.