Environmental impact assessments can misrepresent species distributions: a case study of koalas in Queensland, Australia

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Environmental impact assessments can misrepresent species distributions: a case study of koalas in Queensland, Australia

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Title: Environmental impact assessments can misrepresent species distributions: a case study of koalas in Queensland, Australia
Author/Creator: Cristescu, Romane H | Scales, Kylie L | Schultz, A J | Miller, R L | Schoeman, D S | Dique, D | Frere, C H
Description: Vegetation clearing has been implicated as a major contributor to biodiversity loss.It therefore stands to reason that developers should face a regulatory requirementto assess potential impacts and to avoid, mitigate and compensate for loss of vege-tation wherever proposed infrastructure developments impact on vegetation consid-ered to be habitat for threatened species. Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA)rely on accurate information to describe the distributions of threatened specieswithin the footprint of proposed infrastructure developments, which is critical toensuring appropriate mitigation of potentially deleterious impacts on these popula-tions. EIA survey guidelines seek to determine species ’ presence accurately, whileacknowledging the limits imposed by time and budget constraints. As such, theEIA guidelines may recommend: (1) stratifying the landscape based on previousknowledge of habitat variables relevant to a species; and (2) targeting survey effortto strata with high probability of occupancy. Here, we use koala Phascolarctoscinereus surveys as a case study to explore the extent to which application of EIAguidelines result in accurate occupancy estimates. We compared the presence/ab-sence distribution across one landscape survey and three EIA surveys, and foundthat koala occupancy was not well predicted by koala habitat criteria widely usedto inform sampling design. In the context of EIA, we provide an example of howtargeting survey effort to strata with high probability of occupancy risks misrepre-senting true occurrence patterns. A general issue with survey designs that rely onprevious knowledge is that they self-reinforce erroneous assumptions. Our ﬁndingsstand as a warning that EIA might neither quantify the impact of proposed infras-tructure developments adequately, nor inform the ensuing mitigation measures.Threatened species’ protection in the face of infrastructure development will requirenew approaches to EIAs to ensure that providers are enabled to undertake compre-hensive environmental surveys capable of detecting priority species.
Relation: Animal Conservation / Vol. Article in press
Relation: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/acv.12455
Year: 2018
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Subject: FoR 05 (Environmental Sciences) | FoR 06 (Biological Sciences) | survey design | stratiﬁcation | search effort | infrastructure development | perceivedhabitat quality | Phascolarctos cinereus | EIA | occupancy

Resource Type: Journal Article
Identifier: ISSN: 1367-9430
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