Data deficiency is a substantial challenge for extinction risk assessments because incomplete data means we cannot accurately identify priority protected areas for conservation. Here, we use the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) distributions of amphibians, sharks and rays, fish, mammals, birds, and reptiles to identify hotspots of data deficient species. We found that areas with high numbers of data defici...

Recent extremes of flood and drought across Australia have raised questions about the recurrence of such rare events and highlighted the importance of understanding multi-decadal climate variability. However, instrumental records over the past century are too short to adequately characterise climate variability on multi-decadal and longer timescales or robustly determine extreme event frequencies and their duration. Palaeoclim...

The river continuum concept (RCC) predicts a downstream shift in the reliance of aquatic consumers from terrestrial to aquatic carbon sources, but this concept has rarely been assessed with longitudinal studies. Similarly, there are no studies addressing how forestry related disturbances to the structure of headwater food webs manifest (accumulate/dissipate) downstream and/or whether forest management alters natural longitudin...

Seasonal rainfall forecasts are an important tool for risk management across many sectors. However, significant challenges arise in the development of skilful and practically useful seasonal forecasts for regions where the temporal and spatial variability of rainfall is large and/or knowledge about what causes this variability is in its infancy. This is evident in the state of South Australia ( SA ), where seasonal rainfall cu...

Tropical cyclones ( TCs ) pose a significant risk to the nations and territories of the southwest Pacific ( SWP ). The spatio‐temporal variability of TCs makes it challenging to forecast where and when a TC is likely to develop. Therefore, the aim of this study is to better understand the link between large‐scale climatic variability, the environmental conditions required for tropical cyclogenesis ( TC genesis), and the spatia...

Crowdsourcing is traditionally defined as obtaining data or information by enlisting the services of a (potentially large) number of people. However, due to recent innovations, this definition can now be expanded to include ‘and/or from a range of public sensors, typically connected via the Internet.’ A large and increasing amount of data is now being obtained from a huge variety of non‐traditional sources – from smart phone s...

F rancisella noatunensis subsp. orientalis ( F no ) (syn. F . asiatica ) is an emergent Gram‐negative facultative intracellular bacterium. Although it is considered one of the most pathogenic bacteria in fish, there are no commercially available treatments or vaccines. The objective of this project was to determine the most efficacious concentration of florfenicol ( FFC ) [10, 15 or 20 mg FFC kg −1 body weight (bw) per days fo...