Charles H. Daugherty

TL;DR: New Zealand is used as a case study because of its four-decade history of rat eradications and many detailed and innovative studies of how rats affect native species, including use of exclosures, local manipulations of rat populations, video surveillance, and measurements of responses following eradications.

TL;DR: The pattern of genetic and morphological differentiation reported here supports a taxonomy dating from 1877 that identified two extant species, one subsequently separated into two subspecies, and warrants increased conserving attention for the single populations of S. guntheri and S. reischeki.

TL;DR: Evidence from subfossils and from present distributions confirming range contractions and extinctions of New Zealand amphibians and reptiles is consistent with that from New Zealand landbirds, in which 40% of the fauna has become extinct in the 1000 years since human arrival.

TL;DR: The terrestrial New Zealand fauna has developed on an ancient landmass of continental origins that has had an increasingly isolated existence since the late Mesozoic, characterized by frequent niche shifts, gigantism, and extended life histories with low reproductive rates.

TL;DR: Using allozymes and mtDNA sequences from the cytochrome b gene, it is reported that the brown kiwi has the highest levels of genetic structuring observed in birds, and Shared-derived morphological characters support the same relationships evident in the molecular phylogenies and suggest that as Brown kiwis colonized northward from the southern South Island, they retained many primitive characters that confounded earlier systematists.