Felton, A., Fischer, J., Lindenmayer, D. B., Montague-Drake, R., Lowe, A. R., Saunders, D., Felton, A. M., Steffen. W., Munro, N. T., Youngentob, K., Gillen, J., Gibbons, P., Bruzgul, J. E., Fazey, I., Bond, S. J., Elliott, C. P., Macdonald, B. C. T., Porfirio, L. L., Westgate, M., Worthy, M. (2009). Climate change, conservation and management: an assessment of the peer-reviewed scientific journal literature. Biodiversity and Conservation, 18, (8), 2243-2253. IMPF: 02.07 RONO: 00 Sponsorship: Australian Greenhouse OfficeRecent reviews of the conservation literature indicate that significant biases exist in the published literature regarding the regions, ecosystems and species that have been examined by researchers. Despite the global threat of climatic change, similar biases may be occurring within the sub-discipline of climate-change ecology. Here we hope to foster critical thought and discussion by considering the directions taken by conservation researchers when addressing climate change. To form a quantitative basis for our perspective, we assessed 248 papers from the climate change literature that considered the conservation management of biodiversity and ecosystems. We found that roughly half of the studies considered climate change in isolation from other threatening processes. We also found that the majority of surveyed scientific publications were conducted in the temperate forests of Europe and North America. Regions such as Latin America that are rich in biodiversity but may have low adaptive capacity to climate change were not well represented. We caution that such biases in research effort may be distracting our attention away from vulnerable regions, ecosystems and species. Specifically we suggest that the under-representation of research from regions low in adaptive capacity and rich in biodiversity requires international collaboration by those experienced in climate-change research, with researchers from less wealthy nations who are familiar with local issues, ecosystems and species. Furthermore, we caution that the propensity of ecologists to work in essentially unmodified ecosystems may fundamentally hamper our ability to make useful recommendations in a world that is experiencing significant global change.Peer reviewe

There has been much debate about the relative merits of single-species vs ecosystem-oriented research for conservation. This debate has become increasingly important in recent times as resource managers and policy makers in some jurisdictions focus on ecosystem-level problems. We highlight the potential strengths and limitations of both kinds of research, discuss their complementarity and highlight problems that may arise where competition occurs between the two kinds of research.While a combination of approaches is ideal, a scarcity of funding, time, and expertise means it is impossible to study and manage each species, ecological process, or ecological pattern separately. Making decisions about priorities for the kinds of research, priorities for the kinds of conservation management, and associated allocation of scarce funds is a non-trivial task. We argue for an approach whereby limited resources for conservation research are targeted at projects most likely to close important knowledge gaps, while also promoting ongoing synergies between single-species and ecosystem-oriented research.

Conservation biology is a field of science that is heavily biased against insects and allied invertebrates, largely due to a data deficiency feedback loop that maintains a cycle of ignorance and inaction. Because many invertebrate groups are, and remain, extremely data poor, it is frequently difficult to conduct even the most basic conservation actions, such as status evaluation, listing, recovery and monitoring of threatened species. Thus, declines and extinctions of invertebrates are frequently undetected and poorly documented. To address this data deficiency, we have developed a new national database – Butterflies Australia – for one insect taxon that integrates citizen science (data collectors) with global, standardised monitoring protocols and emerging tools in technology and biodiversity informatics. The database is created from a platform, which consists of a phone app and website, that offers the potential to rapidly increase data availability on the occurrence of Australian butterflies at a far greater scale than was previously possible, as well as to monitor trends in their distribution and abundance over time. We discuss the attributes and importance of successful citizen science projects and quantitative methods for monitoring butterflies, both from an Australian perspective and in an international context, and then outline the operational aspects of the Butterflies Australia platform. A review of survey methods that have been used for monitoring or inventorying butterflies in Australia over the past 50 years revealed a diverse array of sampling techniques, with little standardisation between studies and wide variation in space (sampling unit) and time (sampling effort). Transect counts, in particular, have rarely followed the international guidelines recommended for standardised global butterfly monitoring. Finally, we discuss the benefits of our new citizen science tool for butterflies and potentially other invertebrates. We envisage that our platform will engender increased community awareness, improved quantity and quality of data collection, better conservation policy and planning, as well as enhanced resourcing and research for the conservation management of butterflies.

Biodiversity accounting is promoted as a way of improving the conservation of species and ecosystems. Advancing the theory and practice of biodiversity accounting is driven by the United Nation's standardization of ecosystem accounting in 2021 and a desire to make production of ecosystem accounts commonplace and useful. While the theory of biodiversity accounting has advanced, in practice few accounts have been produced and all have focused on iconic or threatened species. We present a set of novel biodiversity accounts for the 92 butterfly species of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), spanning 1978–2021, using historical records and systematic surveys of 224 sites between 2014–15 and 2020–21 in the Southern Hemisphere survey season (Spring‐Autum). We conclude that species level biodiversity accounting is useful for biodiversity conservation and that species accounting must go beyond accounting for iconic and threatened species and reflect other characteristics, such as the distribution, abundance, residential status, breeding status, endemism, and ecological status of all species. Habitat specialization provides a link to ecosystem condition accounting, with changes in the distribution and abundance of habitat specialists a likely indicator of ecosystem condition. With such information, species accounts can be used to assess and target conservation activity and examples for ACT butterflies are provided.