Summary

Insects represent the largest component of Australasia’s animal diversity. While the uniqueness and conservation needs of Australia and New Zealand’s vertebrates are generally understood, the importance of our insects and the threats they face are less appreciated. Some groups, including locally endemic butterflies and flightless giants, such as giant weta, are important for raising public awareness of insect conservation. However, our understanding of how broad processes influence insect populations and communities is in its infancy. Part of the issue is due to a complete lack of knowledge of the biology of the vast majority of insect species, as most insects in Australasia remain undescribed. In this chapter we discuss insect biodiversity in Australia and New Zealand and discuss both insect species and diversity conservation, contrasting patterns in Australia and New Zealand. We then discuss some of the major threats facing insect species and diversity, specifically focussing on the impacts of habitat loss and fragmentation, predation by invasive rodents and climate change. Lastly, we discuss interactions between insects and humans including the provision of ecosystem services by insects in an agricultural context, human consumption of insects (entomophagy) and concerns surrounding the lack of taxonomic expertise for insects in Australasia.

Insect biodiversity in Australia and New Zealand

The uniqueness of the Australian fauna has been known for centuries, and since the first European explorers returned from voyages to the Antipodes, naturalists have remarked on the diversity of Australasian life, and its peculiarity. While most people are familiar with the stories of European incredulity when faced with a stuffed platypus or kiwi, many may not appreciate that the insect fauna of Australia and New Zealand is equally unique, and far more diverse. The first insect formally identified in Australia was the charismatic Botany Bay weevil (Chrysolopus spectabilis) by Joseph Banks who accompanied James Cook in 1770, but since then over 60 000 species have been described from Australia and New Zealand. Estimates for the species-richness of Australia’s terrestrial insects range between 84 000 species (CSIRO, 1991) and 205 000 (Yeates et al., 2003), of which 75% are yet to be described, and given a name. New Zealand has lower diversity owing to its smaller landmass and its more temperate latitudinal range, but still holds an estimated 20 000 species of insects with 10 000 still requiring description (Cranston, 2010).

The wildlife of the Australian and New Zealand landmasses house a truly unusual component of global biodiversity, a fact now held with a degree of national pride. By global standards, Australia and New Zealand have relatively few people, the majority of whom can trace their ancestry back to other continents in fairly recent time. Nonetheless, one can sense that a frontier mentality of conquer and survive is being replaced with a sense of being custodians for something special. And there is good reason for this. Australian and New Zealand wildlife, uniquely sculpted by long isolation, have been especially vulnerable to the impacts of the anthropocene. This book presents some of the vital research that has been conducted to describe what wildlife is present, what the conservation issues are, and how best to conserve it.

Threats to Australian and New Zealand wildlife are varied and include introduced plants and animals, changes in human land use, pollution, disease and the looming issue of climate change. The loss of native biota has been rapid. A haunting reminder of this can be gained in parts of Central Australia where one can stand on earth raised above the desert plains by the strenuous efforts of the burrowing bettong, a species now removed from the landscape, and their presence still remembered by those living today. Similarly, when listening to the dawn chorus on one of New Zealand’s predator-free offshore islands, one is reminded of the relative silence of most mainland forests, sadly devoid of many native songbirds that once were widespread. While this book serves to remind us of the natural heritage that is under threat in Australia and New Zealand, it has also offered hope, describing the work that is underway to conserve it. There are solutions to many of the issues and a community of passionate individuals who are willing to work on them. The issues and solutions facing wildlife on Austral Ark will not be reiterated in any detail here, instead, the focus is on how we might ensure that all of those that are motivated to help conserve wildlife are harnessed for best effect.

Summary

As in much of the world, Australia’s birds have suffered greatly from habitat loss, feral predators and direct exploitation. Less universal have been the declines caused by post-colonial changes in fire regime after 40 000 years of Indigenous fire management. Climate change and a disengagement by Australians from nature loom as threats for the future. However, Australia is a country of climatic extremes and many birds are well-adapted to stressful conditions. Given adequate investment, all the major classes of threat have potential solutions, with particular success in recent decades in the removal of feral predators from islands and in reducing the by-catch from fishing. The biggest threat of all is possibly a failure to invest in conservation as modern lifestyles take people further and further away from the natural environment.

Introduction

Australia’s birds are, like those in so much of the world, travelling poorly. Of the 1239 species and subspecies regularly occurring in Australia, 17% are Threatened or Near Threatened on the basis of the IUCN Red List Criteria (Garnett et al. 2011). This number has been increasing steadily (Szabo et al. 2012a) and, while originally it was taxa of Australia’s oceanic islands that were most likely to be threatened, taxa from the mainland are now starting to slip away (Szabo et al. 2012b). Sadly some of those most threatened are the most distinctive; birds at the end of long slender branches of the evolutionary tree whose closest relatives are long gone. Other species, however, are thriving under the conditions that have arisen over the past few centuries of intense development.

Summary

In this chapter we examine the biodiversity and the status of conservation and management of shark species in Australasia and Indonesia. Almost 17% of shark species in the region are listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as threatened, and approximately 40% are of conservation concern, their future being dependent on the implementation of appropriate management strategies.

Overfishing is a major threat to sharks, as their life-history strategies make them susceptible to even modest levels of fishing mortality. In Australia and New Zealand many shark stocks experienced dramatic declines as a consequence of overfishing; however, in the past few decades substantial improvements in the management of shark fisheries have taken place. On the other hand, shark fishing in Indonesia is largely unreported and unregulated and fishing by Indonesian vessels is likely to have consequences that go beyond the depletion of local populations, affecting shark populations in neighbouring countries such as Australia.

We illustrate examples of over fishing in the region, discuss the potential effects of habitat degradation and climate change in the future and examine current management frameworks for the conservation of shark species in the region with an emphasis on the implementation of Nation Plans of Action for the Conservation and Management of Sharks (NPoAs).

Summary

The extensive territorial waters of Australia and New Zealands (NZ) (over 8 million km2 for Australia and a further 4 million km2 for NZ) are home to approximately 49 species of whales and dolphins, 11 species of seals and the dugong. Within Australia, at least eight species are listed as threatened, though there is insufficient information on a further 25 to determine their conservation status, while in NZ eight species are listed as threatened. The relationship between humans and Australasia’s marine mammals is culturally diverse and has changed significantly in recent years. Dugongs and stranded whales have been important both spiritually and as a source of nutrition to some Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders for thousands of years; seals and whales had a similar role for Maori in NZ. In recent history, exploitation of baleen whales, elephant seals and fur seals was an important driver for much of the earliest European settlement of Australasia. The success of the whaling and sealing industries came at the expense of marine mammal populations, leading to the near extirpation of many species by the mid twentieth century. In more recent decades there has been a fundamental shift in public attitudes towards marine mammals, in particular the great whales and dolphins. All marine mammals are protected within Australia and NZ waters. Traditional hunting of dugongs is legal in Australia for Native Title holders.

Summary

Fire has a major influence on the management and conservation of Australian biodiversity. Notwithstanding a long history of fire on the continent, inappropriate contemporary fire regimes are a key threatening process for many Australian plant and animal species. Fire regimes vary appreciably across the continent, and different species and taxonomic groups respond in markedly different ways to different regimes. A set of case studies highlights the diversity of wildlife responses to fire, although we acknowledge that this set is inevitably far from a comprehensive assessment of the response of all biodiversity components to all fire regimes. Managing fires for biodiversity remains a challenge, particularly in the more remote parts of the continent or when management is driven mostly by human safety and economic assets. Some notable examples of local-and regional-scale fire management programs for biodiversity conservation are presented. Replicating the conservation benefits of these programmes across other parts of Australia will be difficult and will require improved understanding of the fire regimes required by biodiversity, significant effort in implementation and monitoring of outcomes and better understanding of fire by the Australian community.

Introduction

Australia is the most fire-prone continent. Fire has long shaped its ecosystem processes, the juxtaposition and extent of its ecological communities, the structure and floristics of its vegetation types, the ecology of many species, and the distribution, abundance or extinction of individual species. Much of this potency relates to Australian climatic regimes and Australia’s relative lack of topographic relief (and hence protection from extensive fire). Marked wet–dry (monsoonal) seasonality characterises Australia’s north, catalysing frequent (but relatively low-intensity) fire as the annual crop of tall savanna grasses cures during the long dry season. There is marked seasonality also in the Mediterranean and temperate climates of south-eastern and south-western Australia, and their hot summers prompt high-intensity wildfires. Seasonality is less pronounced in the arid inland areas, but recurring but irregular patterns of drought and wet periods drive infrequent but extensive fires as vegetation biomass built up in high-rainfall years dries when the rains disappear. These differences in environmental settings dictate that the frequency and impacts of fires vary very substantially across the Australian continent (Plate 14; Russell-Smith et al. 2007).

Summary

Australia has a long history of establishing protected areas and they are now the cornerstones of its national and regional conservation strategies, covering over 13% of the country. There are large regional variations in levels of coverage, with most large protected areas placed far from dense human populations and away from productive agricultural land. Most of the recent growth in coverage has been driven by Indigenous Protected Areas and private protected areas, a trend that is likely to increase in the future. It is difficult to say how effective protected areas are in conserving biodiversity due to shortcomings in monitoring and evaluation, but the data that exist show that biodiversity outcomes are variable and that management effectiveness could be substantially improved. Threats to the protected area system are currently increasing with strong government pressure to allow extractive industries, such as mining, logging and grazing, and damaging recreational uses such as hunting to occur on land that is currently protected. If this trend continues, the future holds a great deal of uncertainty for Australia’s protected areas.

Introduction

For centuries people all over the world have set aside places to which they ascribe special values. The reasons for this have been many and various but they are linked by a central purpose – to protect something that humankind perceives as valuable. Over the past century, as human populations have grown and their use of natural resources has increased, so the need to protect the remaining natural areas has also grown. Formally protected areas have become the centrepiece of the global strategy for nature conservation. These are areas where human activities are restricted and that are managed with the primary purpose of nature conservation (Dudley 2008). Australia is no exception in using protected areas as the cornerstones of its national and regional conservation strategies and is a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The CBD is an international legally binding treaty that commits Australia to achieving a number of conservation targets.

Summary

Aquifers of the Austral region are globally significant in terms of their biodiversity. They support a rich and unique fauna, specifically adapted to the harsh subterranean environment. In this chapter we review the nature and diversity of groundwater ecosystems across the Austral region. We consider first the global origins of the Australian groundwater fauna, and their distributions across Gondwana. As the Australian continent evolved, the western shield emerged from the sea during the Proterozoic, which has led to a distinct fauna in those ancient landscapes. In the ‘newer’ eastern Austral regions there has also emerged a rich groundwater fauna, and here we review the current knowledge of fauna in eastern Australia and New Zealand. Mining and agricultural development threaten groundwater ecosystems across the region, but perhaps the greatest threat is our current lack of knowledge of these unique and important ecosystems and their biota. New approaches for conservation planning provide hope for improved recognition and protection of groundwater ecosystems, but with relatively little surveying of groundwater fauna having been done across the region, much remains undiscovered.

Introduction

Being the driest inhabited continent on Earth, the availability of water has always been a critical factor shaping the evolution and distribution of species across Australia. So too, the availability of water is critical to the survival and prosperity of human populations across the broader region, from small outback towns to major capital cities. As human pressures increase demand for water, groundwater is increasingly being used to meet water needs of households, industries and farms. Groundwater use accounts for around 20% of the total water used across Australia, it is more than 50% in New Zealand (Fenwick et al. 2004), and in many areas it is the only reliable water supply.