ConservationBytes.com

This is just a quick post to update ConservationBytes.com followers about a few things I’ll be up to over the next 5 months. While I can guarantee that the posts will be more or less as frequent, some of the subject material might shift slightly given my new geographic focus.

I’m most fortunate to have been invited to spend the rest of 2015 in Franck Courchamp‘s Systematic Ecology & Evolution lab at Université Paris-Sud (also check out Franck’s blog here), and I’ll be leaving for France tomorrow. Franck is a long-time mate and colleague, who has not only previously hosted me briefly in his home in France, he and his family also put me up in Los Angeles earlier this year (where both he and his partner Muriel are on sabbatical themselves at UCLA until the end of August 2015). Franck was also kind enough to visit Adelaide last year where he gave some rather kick-arse seminars.

So what will I be doing during my mini-‘sabbatical’ with Franck? Franck is known for many things, not least of which is his reputation for being ‘King Allee Effect‘, but the main focus of my work there will be on the economic impacts of invasive insects in Europe as the climate continues to warm over the coming century. The project is financed by a large French bank (BNP-Paribas) and is known as InvaCost:

InvaCost will look at the impact on invasive insects, when climate change allows them to invade regions that are now too cold for them, but that will warm up in the coming decades. These include the red imported fire ant, the predatory Asian wasp, the disease-carrying tiger mosquito, and many others that are among the worst invaders worldwide.

Of course, that’s just the main topic. Franck is a little like me in that he’s a jack of many ecological trades, so we also plan to work on a few things like the global impacts of feral cats, some more conservation-based things, and perhaps a review or two. Lots planned for five months!

En route I will be attending and presenting at the 27^th International Congress for Conservation Biology-4^th European Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB-ECB) in Montpellier, which for me gets going on Sunday, 2 August with my workshop entitled ‘Supercharge Your Science‘. If you are a CB.com regular, you’ll have some inkling about the topics I’ll be presenting, including Why Scientists Should Blog, Why Every Scientist Needs an Online Profile, How to Write a Scientific Paper, How to Engage with the Media, and many more related topics. I promise it’ll be a fun and entertaining workshop, with a good dash of irreverence and humour. I’ll also be talking about the pressures of global human population size on biodiversity during a talk on Monday (3 August). I’m looking forward to catching up with mates and colleagues, and meeting a few new ones. Please do introduce yourself if you are also attending and recognise me wandering around the venues.

À la prochaine!

CJA Bradshaw