Conservation & Landscape Ecology
Ecological synthesis
The large projects featured on this website orchestrated by David Lindenmayer and Ross Cunningham over the past 20 years have a number of issues in common, such as habitat fragmentation, altered landscapes, disturbance events and feral animals. These common issues, as well as the large landscape scale of each of the projects, have provided a very unique opportunity to conduct an 'ecological synthesis', to study land-use and fauna response relationships.
This is a very unique situation, where data from five of the large landscape-scale projects are comparable because of similar survey techniques and researchers. The ecological synthesis will provide new knowledge and general principles on land-use/biotic response relationships, for use in biodiversity conservation, forest and plantation management, fire management and vegetation management.
The 'ecological synthesis' began in 2004, and is being conducted primarily by Joern Fischer, David Lindenmayer and Ross Cunningham.
The five large datasets provide information on:
- Over 30 different vegetation types from rainforest to heath
- An array of different fauna groups - arboreal marsupials, terrestrial mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates
- Different management priorities - agriculture, forestry and nature conservation
- Different human and natural disturbance regimes - grazing, forestry and fire.
Publications
Please click here to see a list of books and papers relevant to this project.
Acknowledgements
This synthesis project is funded by Land and Water Australia.
