Artificial burrows with basal chambers are preferred by pygmy bluetongue lizards, Tiliqua adelaidensis

Staugas, Elijah J.; Fenner, Aaron L.; Ebrahimi, Mehregan; Bull, C. Michael

doi:10.1163/15685381-00002864

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(1 reference statement)

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“…Artificial habitat structures are explicitly designed to mimic critical features of animal habitats, allowing animals to persist in disturbed areas (Watchorn et al, 2022). They are often designed to provide places of refuge and are now commonly used in wildlife conservation, with examples including artificial tree hollows for possums, bats, and birds (Goldingay & Stevens, 2009;Harley, 2004), artificial rock crevices for snakes and quolls (Cowan et al, 2020;Croak et al, 2010), and artificial burrows for lizards, foxes, and owls (Harrison et al, 2011;Menzel, 2018;Staugas et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial refuges did not increase small mammal abundance after fire

Watchorn,

Doherty,

Wilson

et al. 2024

Conservat Sci and Prac

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The interacting threats of invasive predators and altered fire regimes are key conservation issues for many native species globally. Artificial refuges have been proposed as a potential conservation tool to provide prey species with protection from invasive predators after fire, but we do not yet know whether they improve animal survival. To address this knowledge gap, we experimentally tested how small mammal abundance and species richness were influenced by the provision of artificial refuges after prescribed burns. We surveyed small mammals across five unburnt sites, seven burnt sites with artificial refuges, and eight burnt control sites following two prescribed fires in southeastern Australia. There were negative and neutral responses of small mammals to the burns, and relative abundance was positively correlated with structurally complex vegetation. Artificial refuges had no impact on abundance or species richness, irrespective of burn coverage. These findings suggest that this artificial refuge design may not be an effective tool for improving small mammal population persistence postfire, and as such we should not yet scale up their application. However, given the inherent context‐dependency of field experiments involving fire, which include difficult‐to‐control variables such as fire severity, predator activity, and population dynamics, we encourage researchers to undertake further experiments with artificial refuges in fire‐affected areas, including after severe wildfires when less vegetation cover remains. Such studies will help to build our understanding of their utility as a conservation tool across different ecosystems and fire types.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial refuges did not increase small mammal abundance after fire

Watchorn,

Doherty,

Wilson

et al. 2024

Conservat Sci and Prac

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“…They are found exclusively in remnant fragments of native grassland in South Australia's mid-north (Li et al, 2009), (Tohl et al, 2013), (Staugas et al, 2013), (Schofield et al, 2013). Identification of individual lizards is essential for ecological studies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pre-processing Techniques to Improve the Efficiency of Video Identification for the Pygmy Bluetongue Lizard

Tohl

Bull

2015

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications

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Abstract:In the study of the endangered Pygmy Bluetongue Lizard, non-invasive photographic identification is preferred to the current invasive methods which can be unreliable and cruel. As the lizard is an endangered species, there are restrictions on its handling. The lizard is also in constant motion and it is therefore difficult to capture a good still image for identification purposes. Hence video capture is preferred as a number of images of the lizard at various positions and qualities can be collected in just a few seconds from which the best image can be selected for identification. With a large number of individual lizards in the database, matching a video sequence of images against each database image for identification will render the process very computationally inefficient. Moreover, a large portion of those images are non-identifiable due to motion and optical blur and different body curvature to the reference database image. In this paper, we propose a number of pre-processing techniques for pre-selecting the best image out of the video image sequence for identification. Using our proposed pre-selection techniques, it has been shown that the computational efficiency can be significantly improved.

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“…They are found exclusively in remnant fragments of native grassland in South Australia's mid-north [1], [18], [19]. Fluctuating asymmetry is believed to be a valuable indicator of environmental stress on wild populations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Image asymmetry measurement for the study of endangered Pygmy Bluetongue Lizard

Tohl

Shamiminoori

et al. 2013

2013 28th International Conference on Image and Vision Computing New Zealand (IVCNZ 2013)

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Abstract-There are applications for the measurement of body asymmetry as some studies have shown a correlation between asymmetry and fitness for some species. In our study of the endangered Pygmy Bluetongue Lizard, the asymmetry of its head is being investigated to see whether this has a correlation with its health and chance of survival in the wild. As there are restrictions on handling the endangered lizards, their digital photos must be taken in the field and therefore it is difficult to impose restrictions on the conditions under which the digital images are acquired. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic technique that is invariant to rotation, size, illumination and tilt, for the measurement of lizard symmetry based on its digital imagery and the resulting symmetry index is used to infer the lizard's asymmetry. The conventional manual methods being used by biologists for fluctuating asymmetry measurement have a number of disadvantages including human errors, and their methods of measurement are based on counting the number of scales and length measurement that do not often agree well with visual assessment. Our proposed image processing technique is non-invasive, robust in a way that will give a similar symmetric index for different images of the same lizard, and more importantly based on the actual image scale pattern of the lizards. Hence our proposed method will also give a better agreement with visual assessment.

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Artificial burrows with basal chambers are preferred by pygmy bluetongue lizards, Tiliqua adelaidensis

Cited by 5 publications

References 21 publications

Artificial refuges did not increase small mammal abundance after fire

Artificial refuges did not increase small mammal abundance after fire

Pre-processing Techniques to Improve the Efficiency of Video Identification for the Pygmy Bluetongue Lizard

Image asymmetry measurement for the study of endangered Pygmy Bluetongue Lizard

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