The koala population in South Australia's Mount Lofty Ranges is increasing, raising concerns about overbrowsing and the need for sustainable management. Using combined demographic, point-process, and...

Current understanding of the global mercury (Hg) cycle is heavily skewed toward the Northern Hemisphere. Australia offers a unique context to address this bias with its vast arid and semiarid regions, highly weathered, nutrient-poor soils, fire-adapted ecosystems, ancient stable geology, and distinct biota. We present a continental-scale analysis of environmental predictors of soil Hg concentrations based on 2,396 samples from 1,141 catchments spanning 5.84 million km2 (∼76% of Australia). Using boosted regression trees and random forest models, we identified an index of ferrosols as the strongest predictor of Hg concentrations, particularly in the temperate forests of southeastern Australia. Other positively associated factors included loss on ignition (a proxy for soil organic matter), soil nitrogen, leaf area index, and nickel and lead concentrations, while soil electrical conductivity and water availability were negatively associated. We generated a robust, high-resolution (0.005° × 0.005°) national Hg distribution map using spatially explicit random forest models. Unlike patterns observed elsewhere, Hg concentrations in Australia are higher in ferrosols and relatively nitrogen-rich soils than in podosols and oxisols. Our findings highlight the need to address regional gaps in Hg research and emphasize the limitations of relying on regionally specific data sets that do not characterize global patterns.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Researchers argue that the emotional pull of teams could become a force in endangered species conservation.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffer from acute food insecurity. This emergency calls for timely preventive and response actions, which depend on our ability to anticipate food crises. Sinc...

Les animaux peuplent les logos des clubs sportifs et en deviennent les mascottes, mais leurs populations réelles déclinent. Et si on transformait cet attachement sportif en actions concrètes ?

Kangaroo Island in South Australia is home to a large, mostly disease-free koala population which, at first glance, looks like a conservation success story.   However, new research from Flinder...

Concerns about declining or ageing populations often centre on the fear that fewer people will translate to a weaker economy and lower living standards. But these fears are frequently based on oversim...

Do you want to understand the how human endeavour and climate fluctuations alter past, present and future ecosystems? Come and learn from Prof. Corey Bradshaw.