Info, news & views for anyone interested in biodiversity conservation and good environmental decision making

“Last year the department counted 63,000 cuttlefish in the Spencer Gulf waters. This year 1,811 were recorded.”
Jenae Madden, ABC Eyre Peninsula [see item 2]

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In this issue of Dbytes

1. Two views on AI in research and communication
2. Giant cuttlefish numbers declined by almost 100%
3. Version 4 of the Australian Frog Atlas
4. Ecological Irreplaceability in the Era of Nature Positive
5. Financier Performance Standard Misaligned With Emerging Nature Positive Requirements: An Orangutan Case Study
6. The Abundance Trap – How we lost 5 billion pigeons
7. Climate denial and the classroom: a review
8. Shifting drivers and predictable corridors of an illegal wildlife trade network

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1. Two views on AI in research and communication:

Scholarship, authorship and genAI: claim your work!
A common argument for ‘ethical’ use of GenAI in academic research and practice is that it’s okay to use these tools to write the final product that you claim authorship for, i.e. drafting, editing or translating sections of a journal article; creating a conference presentation or artistic work; creating a graphical abstract for an original journal article; or writing an outreach article for general audiences. This is misleading and potentially damaging.
Scholarship, authorship and genAI: claim your work! – Ecology is not a dirty word

How AI Tools are Changing Research, Communication, and Education
AI tools allow me to take on research that in the past I would only have dreamed about. Our 1999 paper — with Ken Kunkel and Stan Changnon — on trends in weather extremes in the United States took several years to prepare, write, and get published. It was a great paper and has been widely cited. Now I can do that same analysis — and much more — in just a few months (or less) and produce a product that stays updated in perpetuity.
How AI Tools are Changing Research, Communication, and Education

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2. Giant cuttlefish numbers declined by almost 100%

The South Australian government has released this year’s giant cuttlefish count from the Spencer Gulf. The count shows an almost 100 per cent decline from the 63,000 cuttlefish counted last year. There are calls for the giant cuttlefish to be listed as an endangered species.

Giant cuttlefish numbers declined by almost 100pc this year, PIRSA says – ABC News

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3. Version 4 of the Australian Frog Atlas

In 2022, the Australian Museum released the first version of the Australian Frog Atlas – highly detailed distribution maps of all Australian frog species, largely informed by audio recordings of male frog advertisement calls from the Australian Museum’s FrogID project. The quantity of data gathered by people across the country is rapidly increasing each year, with nearly 1.5 million records of frogs now available to improve our knowledge and understanding of frog distributions. So, four years on from the original publication of the Australian Frog Atlas, we’re introducing Version 4 of the Atlas, with an exciting array of new updates, including newly described species, changes to many species’ names, additional data fields, and massive range extensions in some of the most remote parts of the country!

Updating our understanding of Australian frog distributions: Version 4 of the Australian Frog Atlas – The Australian Museum Blog

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4. Ecological Irreplaceability in the Era of Nature Positive

Global biodiversity decline has breached safe limits, prompting ambitious goals to halt and reverse nature loss. Meeting these goals requires a shift from minimizing losses to securing an absolute net gain of nature and biodiversity. We argue that foundational to this is respecting ecological irreplaceability—the recognition that some ecological assets, such as certain ecosystem types and habitat features upon which species depend, cannot plausibly be restored or replaced within timeframes relevant to the conservation of those ecosystems and species. Despite this ecological reality, many policy settings, particularly around environmental impact assessment and planning, are underpinned by the assumption that lost nature is replaceable. We outline ecological irreplaceability and its implications in the context of nature-positive ambitions. We show how it can be operationalized as the basis of a necessary, fundamental shift in biodiversity policy and conservation decision-making. Embedding the concept in policy is essential to safeguard the potential to achieve nature-positive goals and restore credibility to policy mechanisms that have too often enabled cumulative and irreversible biodiversity loss.

The Society for Conservation Biology

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5. Financier Performance Standard Misaligned With Emerging Nature Positive Requirements: An Orangutan Case Study

The article argues that Performance Standard 6, a benchmark biodiversity safeguard used to limit financing of environmentally destructive projects by the International Finance Corporation, requires updating to align with global commitments to halt and reverse nature loss. The case study focuses on great ape habitat (specifically orangutans) but has wider relevance; PS6 is under review currently.

The Society for Conservation Biology

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6. The Abundance Trap – How we lost 5 billion pigeons

Passenger pigeons survived Indigenous harvest and natural fluctuations in food and climate for millennia. Their obvious advantage was their sheer numbers. By moving, feeding, roosting, and nesting in enormous groups, they overwhelmed ordinary predators and rapidly exploited masting events of acorns and beechnuts across huge areas. They could also engineer the ecosystems to be more favorable for pigeons. But that same strategy became a liability once humans developed the tools to effectively exploit the flocks. During the nineteenth century, several technologies converged that spelled doom for the pigeon. It was especially during the period between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century where the problems took root fast.

https://tnature.substack.com/p/the-abundance-trap

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7. Climate denial and the classroom: a review

Climate change awareness is floundering across the globe despite climate change education being embedded in international treaties to address the climate crisis – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the UNFCCC) and the subsequent Paris Agreement. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledges forces hostile to climate awareness and education – namely, climate denial sponsored by the energy-industrial complex. Climate change is studied by the physical sciences, but climate denial is the purview of the social sciences; the latter has revealed the why and how of climate denial. Climate-denial organizations (which directly deny aspects of the scientific consensus on climate change) and the related petro-pedagogy groups (which teach that oil is a benefactor to humanity, but say little about the connection of fossil fuels to the climate crisis) have arisen to attempt to interfere with the teaching of the science of climate change in school classrooms. These organizations were found in the United States, Canada, and some European nations (this review is mainly restricted to English-language sources). This review aims to (1) provide an overview of climate denial, promoted and funded by the energy-industrial complex; (2) identify and examine organizations involved in climate denial in schools; (3) summarize the strategies of climate-denial organizations in school classrooms; and (4) put forward recommendations for further research and action.

GC – Climate denial and the classroom: a review

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8. Shifting drivers and predictable corridors of an illegal wildlife trade network

Criminal networks driving the multibillion-dollar illegal wildlife trade are notoriously difficult to map, forcing law enforcement into a reactive posture. We address this by pioneering an interdisciplinary framework, repurposing circuit theory from landscape ecology to make these hidden networks visible. Applying our model to three decades of data from Mexico’s parrot trade, we reveal the trade’s “hidden highways” and show how the network’s drivers have fundamentally evolved from rural poverty to urban demand. This predictive approach provides a transferable roadmap for authorities to proactively dismantle not only wildlife trafficking but other illicit supply chains, offering a data-driven tool to protect global biodiversity and enhance security.

Shifting drivers and predictable corridors of an illegal wildlife trade network | PNAS

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About Dbytes

Dbytes is a weekly eNewsletter presenting news and views on biodiversity conservation and environmental decision science. ‘D’ stands for ‘Decision’ and refers to all the ingredients that go into good, fair and just decision-making in relation to the environment.

From 2007-2018 Dbytes was supported by a variety of research networks and primarily the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED). From 2019 Dbytes is being produced by David Salt (Ywords). David was formerly the Editor of Decision Point, the research magazine of CEED.

Dbytes is supported by the Global Water Forum.

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