Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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    Simulating Demography, Monitoring, and Management Decisions to Evaluate Adaptive Management Strategies for Endangered Species
    (Wiley, 2025-04-02) Canessa S; Converse SJ; Adams L; Armstrong DP; Makan T; McCready M; Parker KA; Parlato EH; Sipe HA; Ewen JG
    Adaptive management (AM) remains underused in conservation, partly because optimization-based approaches require real-world problems to be substantially simplified. We present an approach to AM based in management strategy evaluation, a method used largely in fisheries. Managers define objectives and nominate alternative adaptive strategies, whose future performance is simulated by integrating ecological, learning and decision processes. We applied this approach to conservation of hihi (Notiomystis cincta) across Aotearoa-New Zealand. For multiple extant and prospective hihi populations, we jointly simulated demographic trends, monitoring, estimation, and decisions including translocations and supplementary feeding. Results confirmed that food supplementation assisted recovery, but was more intensive and expensive. Over 20 years, actively pursuing learning, for example by removing food from populations, provided little benefit. Recovery group members supported continuing current management or increasing priority on existing populations before reintroducing new populations. Our simulation-based approach can complement formal optimization-based approaches and improve AM uptake, particularly for programs involving many complex and coordinated decisions.
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    Combining prior and post-release data while accounting for dispersal to improve predictions for reintroduction populations
    (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. on behalf of Zoological Society of London., 2024-05-24) Armstrong DP; Stone ZL; Parlato EH; Ngametua G; King E; Gibson S; Zieltjes S; Parker KA; Ewen J; Canessa S
    Attempts to reintroduce species to managed areas may be compromised by dispersal into the surrounding landscape. Therefore, decisions regarding the selection and ongoing management of reintroduction areas require predicting dispersal as well as the survival and reproduction rates of the species to be reintroduced. Dispersal can potentially be measured directly by tracking animals, but this is often impractical. However, dispersal can also be inferred from re-sighting surveys done within reintroduction areas if such data are available from multiple areas with varying connectivity to the surrounding landscape, allowing apparent survival and recruitment to be modelled as a function of connectivity metrics. Here, we show how data from 10 previous reintroductions of a New Zealand passerine, the toutouwai (Petroica longipes), were used to predict population dynamics at a predator-controlled reintroduction area with high connectivity, and predictions then updated using post-release data. Bayesian hierarchical modelling of the previous data produced prior distributions for productivity, adult survival and apparent juvenile survival rates that accounted for random variation among areas as well as rat density and connectivity. The modelling of apparent juvenile survival as a function of connectivity allowed it to be partitioned into estimates of survival and fidelity. Bayesian updating based on post-release data produced posterior distributions for parameters that were consistent with the priors but much more precise. The prior data also allowed the recruitment rate estimated in the new area to be partitioned into separate estimates for productivity, juvenile survival and juvenile fidelity. Consequently, it was possible to not only estimate population growth under current management, but also predict the consequences of reducing the scale or intensity of predator control, facilitating adaptive management. The updated model could then be used to predict population growth as a function of the connectivity and predator control regime at proposed reintroduction areas while accounting for random variation among areas.