Supporting Data for "Ecological forecasts to inform near-term management of threats to biodiversity" (Tulloch et al. 2020, Global Change Biology)

Overview.Contents are Supporting Data for the article "Ecological forecasts to inform near-term management of threats to biodiversity", published in Global Change Biology. Data are derived from two reviews of the scientific literature.Review 1.Evaluated 99 articles in the scientific literature on environmental management to investigate whether near-term forecasts are developed to inform biodiversity decisions in Australia. We reviewed peer-reviewed literature (Web of Science, Accessed 7 November 2018) to create a database of articles with the following search terms: (forecast* OR predict* OR project*) AND future AND (climate change OR global change OR anthropogenic change OR weather OR threat) AND (species OR ecosystem*) AND: (manage* OR protect* OR restore*) AND Australia*. Criteria for inclusion in our review were: (a) focused on Australia’s terrestrial, marine or freshwater natural resources; (b) considered a management or planning action; (c) considered objectives beyond economic development or health; and (d) made at least one time-bound prediction of the future state of the system or species. Of the 281 articles, 182 were excluded due to not meeting at least one of these criteria.
Review 2.Evaluated scientific literature on the effectiveness of 484 actions to manage seven major terrestrial threats in Australia, to identify opportunities for near-term forecasts to inform operational conservation decisions. We conducted a second review of the peer-reviewed environmental and ecological management literature to determine, for each action, which management outcomes have been impacted by near-term or seasonal issues (e.g. drought, cold/hot temperatures, rainfall). We created an initial database of articles by searching for the following terms in Web of Science (Accessed 14 November 2018): (impact* OR effect* OR response* OR respond*) AND (conservation OR biodiversity) AND (species OR ecosystem*) AND Australia*. Within this database, we then searched for terms specific to each of the eight management actions (e.g. for weed control, additional terms of “weed*” AND (management OR control* OR eradicat*) were used to siphon out articles related to eradicating, controlling or managing weeds in Australia (see Appendix 1 for full list of search terms for each management action and number of articles reviewed). Criteria for inclusion in our review were: (a) focused on Australia’s ecosystems or species; and (b) evaluating the outcomes of a management action to restore or maintain biodiversity. Due to high overlap between weed control articles and habitat restoration articles we decided to combine these two categories, resulting in seven threat management actions and 241 articles for evaluation.