The Conservation Scholars series highlights leaders in conservation science and includes a small biography, a list of major scientific publications and a Q & A on each person’s particular area of expertise.
Our fourteenth Conservation Scholar is one of Australia’s better known conservation ecologists: David Lindenmayer. David has been battling for landscape ecology and conservation science to be taken seriously in this country for over 30 years. I recently featured David here at ConservationBytes.com on the importance of incorporating ecological knowledge into Australian bushfire policy, but here’s a more comprehensive coverage of his legacy.
Biography
I am a Research Professor at the Fenner School of Environment & Society at The Australian National University (ANU). I have worked at the ANU for over 17 years and have developed a speciality for establishing and maintaining large-scale, long-term empirical studies. These span wet forests (in Victoria), plantation forests (at Tumut in southern NSW), temperate woodlands (throughout south-western NSW) and coastal heathlands (at Jervis Bay Territory, southern NSW). We examine the response of different groups of biota (birds, mammals, reptiles, frogs, invertebrates and plants) to human or natural interventions in these studies – e.g., logging, plantation development, agricultural and revegetation, fire (wildfire and prescribed burning). We also have projects that attempt to integrate data and ecological insights across these major projects. These major programs have many (> 75) live projects embedded within them, including an array of post-graduate students.
The work we do has some key themes. First, it needs to be underpinned by careful statistical design and we have 3 professional statisticians in our group that have critical experimental design roles in all of our studies. Second, we build significantly upon long-term datasets to quantify longitudinal responses of biota to agents of change. Third, we work closely with land managers and government agencies to increase the chances of our work being adopted on the ground. Fourth, and related to the previous point, we work very hard to communicate our empirical results to a broad audience by publishing semi-popular books and other kinds of communication products.
Our group currently comprises ~ 30 people and the younger scientists in the team are a truly exciting part of its dynamism. Indeed, the best research is usually done by post-graduate researchers!! Our hope is to maintain the research and teaching momentum that we have generated over the past decade to keep the group a vibrant, active and forward-thinking one for several decades to come.
Major Publications
It is difficult to choose some papers above others. But I do like the major empirical ones we have done because large synthesis of field data are not common these days – in an age where the emphasis is on short, ‘newsy’ pieces. I also like writing books and longer review articles because these are a chance to pull together a lot of information and make sense of the literature out there.
- Lindenmayer, DB, D Foster, JF Franklin, M Hunter, R Noss, F Schiemegelow, D Perry. 2004. Salvage harvesting after natural disturbance. Science 303: 1303
- Lindenmayer, DB, RB Cunningham, CF Donnelly, HA Nix, BD Lindenmayer. 2002. The distribution of birds in a novel landscape context. Ecological Monographs 72: 1-18
- Lindenmayer, DB, JF Franklin. 2002. Conserving Forest Biodiversity: A Comprehensive Multiscaled Approach. Island Press, Washington, 351 pp
- Lindenmayer, DB, RB Cunningham, C McGregor, M Crane, D Michael. 2008. The changing nature of bird populations in woodland remnants as a pine plantation emerges: results from a large-scale “natural experiment” of landscape context effects. Ecological Monographs 78: 567-590
- Lindenmayer, DB, R Hobbs, R Montague-Drake, J Alexandra, A Bennett, M Burgman, P Cale, A Calhoun, V Cramer, P Cullen, D Driscoll, L Fahrig, J Fischer, J Franklin, Y Haila, M Hunter, P Gibbons, S Lake, G Luck, S McIntyre, R Mac Nally, A Manning, J Miller, H Mooney, R Noss, H Possingham, D Saunders, F Schmiegelow, M Scott, D Simberloff, T Sisk, B Walker, J Wiens, J Woinarski, E Zavaleta. 2007. A checklist for ecological management of landscapes for conservation. Ecology Letters 10: 1-14
Questions and Answers
1. You are probably best known for your work on vertebrate responses to forested landscape change. What kind of data and studies are needed to gauge how biodiversity responds to such changes?
It is clear to me that there is a paucity of large-scale, long-term datasets really to develop an empirical understanding of what is happening in a changing world. This is what our group does really well I think, so it is a real privilege to be able to do that.
2. Your book, Practical Conservation Biology, is a great introduction to applied conservation. Can you describe what you mean by ‘practical’ and how aspiring students need to approach conservation science?
The aim of the PCB book was to provide students with the thinking and some (and I stress just some) of the tools to tackle real world problems. I am not sure that we succeeded in doing this, but it was a good thing to attempt. I also think it was important to showcase Australian conservation biology because there are some many outstanding researchers and practitioners in this country.
3. Fire management is a ‘hot’ issue (excuse the pun) in Australia and beyond, yet there still seems to be little uptake of good fire disturbance ecology by policy makers. What do we need to be doing differently at the policy level, and how can we facilitate better uptake of landscape disturbance ecology?
This is a tough question because so often fire management issues are hijacked by the emotion that is associated with major natural disturbance events. The issue here is that the science of fire and the science of conservation and environmental management need to be better intersected to examine how to best tackle resource management problems. Policy somehow needs to remain cold to all the emotion that humans throw, often illogically at resource management problems. Otherwise I see that policy making in crisis mode will risk perverse outcomes that will be poor management practice and have negative effects on biodiversity.
4. In your opinion, what are the some of the best ways Australia can improve its poor environmental record and reclaim some of its dwindling biodiversity heritage?
Australian needs to get serious about properly resourcing environmental management and biodiversity conservation. We have endless reports about what to do, yet this rarely transfers to serious things on the ground. Nor does environmental legislation really protect the environment and biodiversity. We also need to get serious about long-term datasets to get somewhere sensible with understanding long-term changes in biota.
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