Industry

Our lab is enthusiastic about developing new partnerships with government and NGOs who are interested in finding improved ways of managing landscapes for biodiversity conservation.  Contact Don to discuss how your cash investment could leverage a PhD scholarship through Deakin’s industry scholarship program, or a whole research fiesta through the ARC Linkage program.

Post Doctoral

Deakin University offers the Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.

If you are interested in joining our lab as an ADPRF (and you have a strong track record with several papers in high-ranking journals; ADPRFs are very competitive), please contact me to discuss your ideas for projects.

If you have a great idea on a theme relevant to our lab and you can gather financial support from industry partners, I am happy to discuss developing an ARC Linkage grant.

PhD

Supporting PhD students with a scholarship is now a high priority for Deakin University, which offers several types of PhD scholarships.

If you have a first-class honours result, and/or have published a paper in a reasonable journal, consider applying for a PhD.

Please email me to discuss topics that are currently available, or to suggest an area that interests you and aligns with our labs conservation themes. Almost all of our projects require driving manual four-wheel drives and doing independent field work.  You must have a licence to drive a manual vehicle to take on a field project.

Current projects I would love someone to take up include:

Using movement ecology to understand bushfire and habitat fragmentation in dynamic landscapes using high resolution automated tracking.

Habitat fragmentation and loss is the major cause of the current biodiversity crisis. Human use of landscapes, particularly in agricultural regions, has left only a small percentage of the native vegetation, and this is often in narrow remnants and isolated patches. Despite this loss, many native species persist, but may be headed towards extinction without appropriate intervention (Driscoll 2004, Bell et al. 2022).  Analogous to human-caused habitat loss, bushfires alter ecosystems and can fragment habitat for species that depend on particular fire regimes to persist.  A key cause of decline is the limited capacity of species to move across fragmented landscapes (Driscoll et al. 2013).  If individuals cannot disperse to recolonise areas where previous populations have become extinct, or if animals cannot move across the land to reach essential resources, populations will decline.  It is therefore critical to understand the circumstances that can enable movement across landscapes fragmented by fire or land clearing, with implications for metapopulation and metacommunity dynamics (Driscoll and Lindenmayer 2009). In this study the PhD scholar will deploy a new automated tracking system to understand how movement behaviour interacts with land management practices to either block or facilitate movement.  The tracking system, known as ATLAS (Beardsworth et al. 2022), uses time of signal arrival at stationary receivers to calculate the location of transmitters with GPS accuracy.  This exciting new project is a cross disciplinary collaboration with Deakin University’s A2I2, and the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

Beardsworth, C. E., E. Gobbens, F. van Maarseveen, B. Denissen, A. Dekinga, R. Nathan, S. Toledo, and A. I. Bijleveld. 2022. Validating ATLAS: A regional-scale high-throughput tracking system. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 13:1990-2004.

Bell, K., D. A. Driscoll, and T. S. Doherty. 2022. Slow loss of a foundation species in agricultural landscapes: Effects of nutrients, land clearing, and other factors. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment 323:107681.

Driscoll, D. A. 2004. Extinction and outbreaks accompany fragmentation of a reptile community. Ecological Applications 14:220-240.

Driscoll, D. A., S. C. Banks, P. S. Barton, D. B. Lindenmayer, and A. L. Smith. 2013. Conceptual domain of the matrix in fragmented landscapes. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 28:605-613.

Driscoll, D. A., and D. B. Lindenmayer. 2009. Empirical tests of metacommunity theory using an isolation gradient. Ecological Monographs 79:485-501.

Is environmental watering a solution to drought-inflicted declines of frogs?

Prolonged drought associated with climate change is driving widespread loss of frogs from Australian landscapes (Scheele et al. 2012, Scheele et al. 2016), altering food webs, reducing ecosystem services. Drough is also a leading cause of declines in body condition, a possible precursor to population declines (Macdonald et al. 2023).  Environmental watering offers a way to prevent declines, such as by ensuring breeding ponds do not dry out too soon or that non-breeding refuges remain moist during dry periods.  But these watering solutions are complicated by potential interactions with the amphibian disease chytridiomycosis. Chytrid has driven declines in 43 Australian species including seven extinctions and is the worst wildlife disease globally.  This project will examine this conundrum in the endangered Bibron’s toadlet (Pseudophryne bibronii). Bibron’s toadlets breed in small, ephemeral pools in autumn, a system with enormous potential for assistance through e-water because very small amounts of water are needed.

Macdonald, K. J., D. A. Driscoll, K. J. Macdonald, B. Hradsky, and T. S. Doherty. 2023. Meta-analysis reveals impacts of disturbance on reptile and amphibian body condition. Global Change Biology 29:4697-5113.

Scheele, B. C., D. A. Driscoll, J. Fischer, and D. A. Hunter. 2012. Decline of an endangered amphibian during an extreme climatic event. Ecosphere 3:art101. http://dx.doi.org/110.1890/ES1812-00108.00101.

Scheele, B. C., D. A. Hunter, S. Banks, J. Pierson, L. F. Skerratt, R. Webb, and D. A. Driscoll. 2016. High adult mortality in disease-challenged frog populations increases vulnerability to drought. Journal of Animal Ecology 85:1453-1460.

How to recover extinct in the wild Christmas Island Reptiles

 Christmas Island is a centre of endemism but also of tragic biodiversity loss. Through inadequate biosecurity, invasive species have been transported by people to Christmas Island and caused havoc.  Unique species are now extinct, and others teeter on the absolute precipice, only saved from extinction by last minute interventions and valiant captive breeding programs (Emery et al. 2021).  A new management plan is being developed that will highlight priority projects to help save extinct-in-the-wild reptiles.  Challenges include: understanding risks of hybridisation of Listers’ gecko with other geckos on potential release sites; spatial dynamics of invasive wolf snakes using eDNA and other methods, and potential metapopulation dynamics of snake-free space; developing low-input monitoring using novel cameras and AI image processing; wolf snake trapping using pheromone and other scents as bait; exclusion fence design and experimental trials. There may also be opportunities to re-discover the Christmas Island blind snake.  Multiple angles could be included within the same PhD project, and these would be developed in collaboration with Parks Australia.

Emery, J.-P., N. J. Mitchell, H. Cogger, J. Agius, P. Andrew, S. Arnall, T. Detto, D. A. Driscoll, S. Flakus, P. Green, P. Harlow, M. McFadden, C. Pink, K. Retallick, K. Rose, M. Sleeth, B. Tiernan, L. E. Valentine, and J. Z. Woinarski. 2021. The lost lizards of Christmas Island: A retrospective assessment of factors driving the collapse of a native reptile community. Conservation Science and Practice 3:e358.

Impacts of agricultural intensification on frogs

Global pressures from increasing human populations and increasing demand for resources is driving growth in agricultural production (Driscoll et al. 2014, Ng et al. 2018, Balouch et al. 2022).  This brings new pressure on ephemeral swamps, which are at risk of draining and clearing to make way for new cropping areas.  However, ephemeral swamps provide critical resources for a broad range of native species. Loss of these important natural habitats leads to loss of biodiversity through direct destruction of habitat, but also with potential for larger landscape scale effects through breakdown of metapopulations.  New PhD projects on this topic will address how agricultural intensification affects frog communities in south-western Victoria, in collaboration with Beyond Bolac Landcare and Glenelg Hopkins CMA.

Balouch, S., D. A. Driscoll, A. Naseer, R. Muhammad, and T. S. Doherty. 2022. Impacts of land cover on reptile movement and habitat use in farming landscapes. Animal Conservation 25: 837-848.

Driscoll, D. A., J. A. Catford, J. N. Barney, P. E. Hulme, Inderjit, T. G. Martin, A. Pauchard, P. Pyšek, D. M. Richardson, S. Riley, and V. Visser. 2014. New pasture plants intensify invasive species risk. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 111:16622–16627.

Ng, K., P. S. Barton, W. Blanchard, M. J. Evans, D. B. Lindenmayer, S. Macfadyen, S. McIntyre, and D. A. Driscoll. 2018. Disentangling the effects of farmland use, habitat edges, and vegetation structure on ground beetle morphological traits. Oecologia 188:645-657.

New technology for solving ecological conundrums for small animals. 

With advances in AI for processing images, it is now feasible to ask novel questions about the ecology and behaviour of wildlife using data collected from automated cameras.  While commercial camera traps are largely limited in application to warm-blooded animals, new approaches allow video monitoring of all animals, including reptiles, frogs, and invertebrates (Corva et al. 2022).  This project would aim to collect video data using novel video traps then collate the videos, label a very large number of them, and work with collaborators in Deakin’s School of IT to train machine learning algorithms.  Ultimately, a full data-set would be collected to address ecological research questions about movement and behaviour of small animals in fragmented agricultural landscapes, or in fire mosaics.

Corva, D. M., N. I. Semianiw, A. C. Eichholtzer, S. D. Adams, M. A. P. Mahmud, K. Gaur, A. J. L. Pestell, D. A. Driscoll, and A. Z. Kouzani. 2022. A Smart Camera Trap for Detection of Endotherms and Ectotherms. Sensors 22, 4094. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22114094.

Information technology in applied conservation and ecology.

If you have solid background in machine learning and image analysis and would like to contribute to revolutionising the way ecology is done in the field, there are opportunities opening up in cross-disciplinary research. Email me to discuss options. These projects would be done in collaboration with Deakin’s IT researchers.

Honours

If you have a great idea that would complement an existing or proposed PhD project, please contact me to discuss your ideas.

Honours projects available.

 To complete field projects, you will need to gather volunteers, and you will need a manual driver’s license. Frog projects involve night work.

 Specific projects on offer: 

1. Land-sharing despite intensifying agriculture (Suits mid-year start). In collaboration with the community group Beyond Bolac, this project aims to discover the management regimes and landscape variables that determine where the endangered frog Litoria raniformis survives. #this project is being done by Tom Hernan!
2. Frogs versus fire? (suits February start) Pseudophryne semimarmorata is listed as vulnerable in Victoria due to reported declines. In collaboration with the Ecology Centre, this project aims to discover how fire management influences this autumn-breeding frog.
3. Frogs, drought and chytrid. Pseudophryne bibroni is an autumn-breeding frog with concerns that it may be at risk of decline. This project will build on previous data to understand how drought, chytrid and a novel intervention interact to influence frog survival.
4. Threatened reptile monitoring. Aprasia parapulchella, the pink-tailed worm-lizard, is a threatened species with a restricted distribution in Victoria. This project would be developed in collaboration with the Aprasia recovery team. (Feb, or mid year start)
5. Movement ecology. In collaboration with Australia Wildlife Conservancy, this project will contribute to implementing new technology for automatically tracking wildlife to answer questions about how movement behaviour influences habitat use. Suits someone with an aptitude for data analysis. #this project is currently part of Scarlett Shannon 
6. Christmas Island Reptiles. A new management plan has just been developed that highlights some priority projects to help save extinct-in-the-wild reptiles. You would need to self-fund some of the travel, but if you are up for that, this is a very exciting project with potential to help save a species from extinction.  Areas of work include:

• wolf snake trap trials: multiple options we have already scoped out and have some equipment to run with ie luring snakes with skink, gecko or snake scent. Multiple different kinds of traps and lures have been designed but not trialled – including terracotta pots, funnel traps, drift fences etc. All on island and ready to go!
• Applications of new AI-assisted cameras to detect invasive species and monitor extinct-in-the-wild reptiles

7. Reptiles in the alps. Impacts of feral horses. This project will be working closely with a PhD student to extend an existing field design to include reptiles. Some reptile id skills are needed. This project is being done by Abbey Keles!
8. Developing new monitoring tools for reptiles, frogs and invertebrates. In this project you will collect video data using novel video traps then collate the videos, label a very large number of them, and work with IT collaborators to train machine learning algorithms.
9. Reconnecting landscapes through the matrix. A test using invertebrates. Co-supervised by Nick Porch, Stephanie Pulsford. Wildlife movement is critical.  It enables effective foraging within a home range, dispersal to new home ranges and range changes in response to climate change.  However, movement is severely curtailed by habitat loss associated with intensive agriculture. This project aims to discover if wildlife movement can be improved through productive farmland by altering management within paddocks. By understanding the connectivity value of rotational grazing, fences, linear tree plantings, and addition of course woody debris, we will define new methods for enhancing ecological sustainability in production landscapes. Without this knowledge, opportunities for increasing connectivity may be foregone. This project will involve converting a large invertebrate collection into data in Nick’s lab, undertaking statistical analysis with the close guidance of Don and Stephanie, then writing up the project with input from all supervisors.  For the right student, this project has the potential to lead to one or more publications, and a great early start to your career. #this project is being done by Rowenna Lewis.