A quick post to plug three papers that have hit the streets over recent months. The first is a case study of interspecific variation in the phenology of advertisement in frog communities. It was a fun paper to do, drawing together my own monitoring data from across northern Melbourne and coupling it with an extensive dataset collected by Stefano Canessa and Kirsten Parris across the same region in 2009. We built models of calling seasonality and within-season meteorological drivers for the resident frogs, and used these models to assess interspecific variation in peak calling periods. The paper is now published online over at Ecology and Evolution.

The second paper is the culmination of copious hard-work by Claire Keely, whose PhD I co-supervise. After 6 months trudging through the swamps of outer Melbourne searching for Growling Grass Frogs, followed by long hours in the lab genotyping hundreds of individuals, Claire has gained important data on the genetic structure and diversity of this endangered species around the city. It is great to see this work come to fruition. You can find out more about the paper and Claire’s PhD here. The paper itself is freely downloadable from Royal Society Open Science.

Third on the list is the first paper from Lucy Rose’s PhD. Lucy is interested in conservation decision making for freshwater systems in southern Australia, and has used our beloved Growler as a case study for integrating uncertainty in cost-effectiveness analyses. Lucy tackled the rather complex case of how Growlers will respond to urban growth in the Lockerbie Precinct north of Melbourne, working her way through the myriad of conservation options for the species to identify those that not only maximize cost-effectiveness, but minimize uncertainty due to demographic stochasticity and model imprecision. Lucy’s paper is currently online early at Conservation Biology.