Give way to the invader

25 01 2012

By weird coincidence, Salvador Herrando-Pérez (student blogger extra-ordinaire – see his previous posts on evolution, pollination, bird losses, taxonomic inflation, niche conservatism, historical biogeography, ecological traps and ocean giants) has produced a post this week expanding on the problem of roads. Also weirdly coincidental is that both Salva and I are in his home country of Spain this week.

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Australia’s > 800,000-km road network would go 60 times around the equator of our planet. Confined to the boundaries of any one country, roads are a conspicuous component of the landscape, and shape the dispersion, survival and reproduction of many plants and animals in urban and remote areas.

Those who drive (or are driven by) will be familiar with the image of a crushed kangaroo on the roadside (a hedgehog in Europe), or the sticky mosaic of insects smashed against the windscreen after a high-speed run. Mortality by collision is one of the many effects that roads can have on the demography of organisms – including humans. Those effects encompass

  • physical alteration of terrestrial and aquatic habitats,
  • chemical pollution leakage during road construction and maintenance, and from asphalt compounds during storms,
  • alteration of animal behaviour (e.g., change in home range, or in patterns of flight or vocalisation),
  • access to remote areas by hunters, fishermen and gatherers in general, and
  • intense habitat fragmentation1-3.

However, some species get around those negative impacts by using the roads as pathways to new territories, thereby eluding barriers like seas, mountains, rivers, dense vegetation, or competition for vital resources with other species. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : alien species, Australia, conservation, demography, environmental engineering, environmental policy, evolution, fragmentation, invasive species, management, predator, temperate, tropical

The seeds of tropical forest destruction

22 01 2012

www.sumatranforest.org

Bill Laurance asked me to reproduce his latest piece originally published at Yale University‘s Environment 360 website.

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We live in an era of unprecedented road and highway expansion — an era in which many of the world’s last tropical wildernesses, from the Amazon to Borneo to the Congo Basin, have been penetrated by roads. This surge in road building is being driven not only by national plans for infrastructure expansion, but by industrial timber, oil, gas, and mineral projects in the tropics.

Few areas are unaffected. Brazil is currently building 7,500 km of new paved highways that crisscross the Amazon basin. Three major new highways are cutting across the towering Andes mountains, providing a direct link for timber and agricultural exports from the Amazon to resource-hungry Pacific Rim nations, such as China. And in the Congo basin, a recent satellite study found a burgeoning network of more than 50,000 km of new logging roads. These are but a small sample of the vast number of new tropical roads, which inevitably open up previously intact tropical forests to a host of extractive and economic activities.

“Roads,” said the eminent ecologist Thomas Lovejoy, “are the seeds of tropical forest destruction.”

Despite their environmental costs, the economic incentives to drive roads into tropical wilderness are strong. Governments view roads as a cost-effective means to promote economic development and access natural No other region can match the tropics for the sheer scale and pace of road expansion. resources. Local communities in remote areas often demand new roads to improve access to markets and medical services. And geopolitically, new roads can be used to help secure resource-rich frontier regions. India, for instance, is currently constructing and upgrading roads to tighten its hold on Arunachal Pradesh state, over which it and China formerly fought a war.

Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : conservation, corruption, deforestation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, fragmentation, habitat loss, harvest, rain forests, South America, South East Asia, tropical

More is better

18 01 2012

In one of those rare moments of perusing the latest ecological literature, I stumbled across an absolute gem, and one that has huge conservation implications. Now, I’m really no expert in this particular area of ecology, but I dare say the paper I’m about to introduce should have been published in Nature or Science (I suspect it was submitted to at least one of these journals first). It was still published in an extremely high-impact journal in ecology though – the Journal of Ecology produced by the British Ecological Society (and one in which I too have had the honour of publishing an article).

Before I get into specifics, I have to say that one thing we conservation biologists tend to bang on about is that MORE SPECIES = BETTER, regardless of the ecosystem in question. We tend to value species richness as the gold standard of ecosystem ‘health’ and ‘resilience’, whether or not there is strong empirical evidence in support. It’s as if the more-is-better mantra strikes an intuitive chord and must, by all that’s ecologically right in the world, be true.

Of course, measuring what is ‘better’ is a difficult task, especially when we are talking about complex ecosystems comprising thousands, if not millions, of species. Does ‘better’ refer to the most temporally stable, the most genetically diverse, the most resilient to perturbation, or the provider of the greatest number of functions and hence, ecosystem services?

It’s up to you, but all these things tend to be difficult to measure for a large number of species and over time scales of sufficient duration to measure change. So the default for plants (i.e., the structural framework of almost all ecosystems) I guess has come down to a simpler measure of success – ‘productivity’. This essentially means how much biomass is produced per unit area/volume per time step. It’s not a great metric, but it’s probably one of the more readily quantifiable indices.

Enter the so-called ‘diversity-productivity relationship’, or ‘DPR’, which predicts that higher plant species diversity should engender higher net productivity (otherwise known as the ‘net biodiversity effect’). Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, modelling, reforestation, restoration

Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss XIV

30 12 2011

The last post of 2011, I thought I’d focus on the lighter side (that is to say, my brain is muddled by the lovely break from academia, so I don’t really feel like investing too much cerebral energy). Here, therefore, are the latest six cartoons… (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here). May fewer species go extinct in 2012 than 2011…

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Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biodiversity, cartoon, climate change, conservation, economics, environmental policy, logging

Surgical conservation: gain requires some pain

21 12 2011

© 2008-2011 ~Hiuki http://fav.me/d1j3ns9

I apologise to CB readers for the unusually low frequency of posts this month. With the International Congress for Conservation Biology taking up a lot of my time earlier this month, and the standard palaver of xmas preparations (i.e., getting shit done before the end of the year), I’m afraid the blog has taken a back seat. Now officially ‘on leave’ (whatever that means for an academic), I have found a brief window during which I can put a few thoughts together.

For this post I must take you back to October 2011 when, if you were in Australia, you might have heard about the so-called ‘debacle‘ of the Macquarie Island rabbit/rate/mouse-eradication programme in which it was identified that a few thousand seabirds had become the collateral damage.

To recap, an intense poisoning programme was initiated on subantarctic Macquarie Island to eradicate these pests after years of massive environmental degradation had finally forced the government’s (of Tasmania and the Commonwealth) hand to do something. What caught my eye in all this was the sheer stupidity and politicking associated with the programme, in which hyper-conservative Eric Abetz (Liberal Senator for Tasmania) managed to turn this amazing success into a Labor-bashing political sledge-hammer.

Abetz is no stranger to anti-environmentalism and fights vehemently for Tasmania’s forest-raping industry; he considers political parties such as the Greens, environmental groups such as The Wilderness Society and pro-democracy groups such as Get Up! his mortal enemies. He’s even had a go at esteemed author Richard Flanagan for supporting the anti-deforestation movement in Tasmania! Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : alien species, Australia, conservation, environmental policy, extinction, invasive species, management, research, science

Not magic, but necessary

18 10 2011

In April this year, some American colleagues of ours wrote a rather detailed, 10-page article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution that attacked our concept of generalizing minimum viable population (MVP) size estimates among species. Steve Beissinger of the University of California at Berkeley, one of the paper’s co-authors, has been a particularly vocal adversary of some of the applications of population viability analysis and its child, MVP size, for many years. While there was some interesting points raised in their review, their arguments largely lacked any real punch, and they essentially ended up agreeing with us.

Let me explain. Today, our response to that critique was published online in the same journal: Minimum viable population size: not magic, but necessary. I want to take some time here to summarise the main points of contention and our rebuttal.

But first, let’s recap what we have been arguing all along in several papers over the last few years (i.e., Brook et al. 2006; Traill et al. 2007, 2010; Clements et al. 2011) – a minimum viable population size is the point at which a declining population becomes a small population (sensu Caughley 1994). In other words, it’s the point at which a population becomes susceptible to random (stochastic) events that wouldn’t otherwise matter for a small population.

Consider the great auk (Pinguinus impennis), a formerly widespread and abundant North Atlantic species that was reduced by intensive hunting throughout its range. How did it eventually go extinct? The last remaining population blew up in a volcanic explosion off the coast of Iceland (Halliday 1978). Had the population been large, the small dent in the population due to the loss of those individuals would have been irrelevant.

But what is ‘large’? The empirical evidence, as we’ve pointed out time and time again, is that large = thousands, not hundreds, of individuals.

So this is why we advocate that conservation targets should aim to keep at or recover to the thousands mark. Less than that, and you’re playing Russian roulette with a species’ existence. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Allee effect, biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, demography, ecological triage, environmental policy, extinction debt, extinction vortex, inbreeding depression, minimum viable population, mvp, population viability analysis, PVA

Little left to lose: deforestation history of Australia

6 10 2011

© donkeycart http://ow.ly/6OSeX

I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to blog about a paper I’ve just had accepted in the Journal of Plant Ecology that isn’t yet out online. The reason for the early post is that the paper itself won’t appear until 2012 in a special issue of the journal, and I think the information needs to get out there.

First, a little history – In May this year I blogged about a workshop that I attended at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China at the behest of Fangliang He. The workshop (International Symposium for Biodiversity and Theoretical Ecology) was attended by big-wig overseas ecologists and local talent, and was not only informative, but a lot of fun (apart from the slight headache on the way home from a little too much báijiǔ the night before). More importantly, we  lǎo wài (老外) were paired with various students to assist with publications in progress, and I’m happy to say that for me, two of those have already produced fruit (one paper in review, another about to be submitted).

But the real reason for this post was the special issue of papers written by the invitees – I haven’t published in the journal before, and understand that it is a Chinese journal that has gone mainstream internationally now. I’m only happy to contribute to lifting its profile.

Given that I’m not a plant ecologist per se (although I’ve dabbled), I decided to write a review-like paper that I’ve been meaning to put together for some time now examining the state of Australia’s forests and the history of her deforestation and forest degradation. The reason I thought this was needed is that there is no single peer-reviewed resource one can turn to for a concise synopsis of the history of our country’s forest destruction. The stats are out there, but they’re buried in books, government reports and local-scale scientific papers. My hope is that my paper will be used as a general reference point for people wishing to get up to speed with Australia’s deforestation history.

The paper is entitled Little left to lose: deforestation and forest degradation in Australia since European colonisation, and it describes the general trends in forest loss and degradation Australia-wide, followed by state- and territory-level assessments. I’ve also included sections on plantations, biodiversity loss from deforestation and fragmentation, the feedback loop between climate change and deforestation, the history of forest protection legislation, and finally, a discussion of the necessary general policy directions needed for the country’s forests.

I’ve given a few titbits of the stats in a previous post, but let me just summarise some of the salient features here: Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, climate change, conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, extinction, extinction debt, fragmentation, habitat loss, logging, rain forests, reforestation, reserve, South Australia, South East Asia, southern Australia

1 million hectares annually – the forest destruction of Indonesia

30 09 2011

© A. Kenyon http://goo.gl/UpG3m

Bill Laurance wrote a compelling and very dour piece in The Conversation this week. He asked for some ‘link love’, so I decided to reproduce the article here for ConservationBytes.com readers. Full credit to Bill and The Conversation, of course.

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What comes to mind when you think of Indonesia?

For biologists like myself, Australia’s northern neighbour provokes visions of ancient rainforests being razed by slash-and-burn farmers, and endangered tigers and orangutans fleeing from growling bulldozers.

This reality is true, but there is also hope on the horizon.

Indonesia is a vast, sprawling nation, spanning some 17,000 islands. Among these are Java, Sumatra, half of New Guinea and much of Borneo.

Some of the planet’s most biologically rich and most endangered real estate is found on this archipelago.

Today, Indonesia is losing around 1.1 million hectares of forest annually. That’s an area a third the size of Belgium, bigger than Australia’s Wet Tropics World Heritage Area.

With forest loss now slowing in Brazil, Indonesia has the dubious distinction of being the world’s deforestation “leader”. No nation is destroying its forests faster.

In Sumatra, where I visited recently, the world’s biggest paper-pulp corporations are chopping down hundreds of thousands of hectares of native rainforest to make paper and cardboard.

Some of these corporations also fund aggressive lobbyists, such as World Growth in Washington DC [CJA Bradshaw's note: see our piece on one particular patron of WG - Alan Oxley], to combat their critics and dissuade major retail chains from dropping their products. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, corruption, deforestation, environmental policy, extinction, fire, fragmentation, habitat loss, harvest, Indonesia, logging, Norway, rain forests, reserve, tropical

No substitute for primary forest

15 09 2011

© Romulo Fotos http://goo.gl/CrAsE

A little over five years ago, a controversial and spectacularly erroneous paper appeared in the tropical ecology journal Biotropica, the flagship journal of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. Now, I’m normally a fan of Biotropica (I have both published there several times and acted as a Subject Editor for several years), but we couldn’t let that paper’s conclusions go unchallenged.

That paper was ‘The future of tropical forest species‘ by Joseph Wright and Helene Muller-Landau, which essentially concluded that the severe deforestation and degradation of tropical forests was not as big a deal as nearly all the rest of the conservation biology community had concluded (remind you of climate change at all?), and that regenerating, degraded and secondary forests would suffice to preserve the enormity and majority of dependent tropical biodiversity.

What rubbish.

Our response, and those of many others (including from Toby Gardner and colleagues and William Laurance), were fast and furious, essentially destroying the argument so utterly that I think most people merely moved on. We know for a fact that tropical biodiversity is waning rapidly, and in many parts of the world, it is absolutely [insert expletive here]. However, the argument has reared its ugly head again and again over the intervening years, so it’s high time we bury this particular nonsense once and for all.

In fact, a few anecdotes are worthy of mention here. Navjot once told me one story about the time when both he and Wright were invited to the same symposium around the time of the initial dust-up in Biotropica. Being Navjot, he tore off strips from Wright in public for his outrageous and unsubstantiated claims – something to which Wright didn’t take too kindly.  On the way home, the two shared the same flight, and apparently Wright refused to acknowledge Navjot’s existence and only glared looks that could kill (hang on – maybe that had something to do with Navjot’s recent and untimely death? Who knows?). Similar public stoushes have been chronicled between Wright and Bill Laurance.

Back to the story. I recall a particular coffee discussion at the National University of Singapore between Navjot Sodhi (may his legacy endure), Barry Brook and me some time later where we planned the idea of a large meta-analysis to compare degraded and ‘primary’ (not overly disturbed) forests. The ideas were fairly fuzzy back then, but Navjot didn’t drop the ball for a moment. He immediately went out and got Tien Ming Lee and his new PhD student, Luke Gibson, to start compiling the necessary studies. It was a thankless job that took several years.

However, the fruits of that labour have now just been published in Nature: ‘Primary forests are irreplaceable for sustaining tropical biodiversity‘, led by Luke and Tien Ming, along with Lian Pin Koh, Barry Brook, Toby Gardner, Jos Barlow, Carlos Peres, me, Bill Laurance, Tom Lovejoy and of course, Navjot Sodhi [side note: Navjot died during the review and didn't survive to hear the good news that the paper was finally accepted].

Using data from 138 studies from Asia, South America and Africa comprising 2220 pair-wise comparisons of biodiversity ‘values’ between forests that had undergone some sort of disturbance (everything from selective logging through to regenerating pasture) and adjacent primary forests, we can now hammer the final nails into the coffin containing the putrid remains of Wright and Muller-Landau’s assertion – there is no substitute for primary forest. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, Amazon, Asia, biodiversity, Borneo, Central America, conservation, deforestation, endemism, environmental policy, extinction, habitat loss, Indonesia, living dead, logging, Malaysia, mammal, oil palm, palm oil, prioritisation, protected area, rain forests, reforestation, reserve, restoration, Sarawak, South America, South East Asia, threatened species, tropical

When you have no idea, you should shut up

12 09 2011

© Taren McCallan-Moore

Last week, The Conversation published a particularly wonderful example of uninformed drivel that requires a little bit of a reality injection.

Like our good friend, the Destroyer of Forests (a.k.a. Alan Oxley), a new pro-deforestation, pro-development cheerleader on the scene, a certain Phillip Lawrence apparently undertaking a PhD entitled ‘Ecological Modernization of the Indonesian Economy: A Political, Cultural and Historical Economic Study‘ at Macquarie University in Sydney (The Conversation mistakenly attributes him to the University of Sydney, unless of course, he’s moved recently), has royally stuck his foot in it with respect to the dangers of oil palm in South-East Asia.

Mr. Lawrence runs an interestingly titled blog ‘Eco Logical Strategies‘, especially considering there is nothing whatsoever regarding ‘ecology’ on the site, and this ignorance comes forth in a wonderful array of verbal spew in his latest Conversation piece. He’s also a consultant for one of the most destructive forces in Indonesia – Asia Pulp and Paper – a company with a more depressive environmental track record than the likes of Monsanto, General Electric and BP combined. That preface of conflict of interest now explained, I will now expose Mr. Lawrence for the wolf in sheep’s clothing he really is.

Banging the development and anti-poverty drum like Oxley, albeit with much less panache and linguistic flourish, Mr. Lawrence boldly claims, without a shred of evidence, that “There is ample peer-reviewed research that is supportive of the palm oil industry in Indonesia.”

Excuse me? Supportive of just what component of the palm oil industry, Mr. Lawrence? Would that be that it makes a shit-load of cash for a preciously small component of Indonesian (and foreign) society? Let’s just look at the peer-reviewed literature, shall we? Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, habitat loss, Indonesia, Malaysia, oil palm, palm oil, South East Asia, tropical

Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss XIII

17 08 2011

The latest six cartoons… (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

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Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biodiversity, cartoon, climate change, conservation, economics, environmental policy, logging

Gagging scientists about marine parks

14 08 2011

© Louisa Gouliamaki AFP

Apologies to my readers for the lack of a post this past week – I’ve been attending the Ecological Society of America‘s 96th Annual Meeting in an extremely hot (42 °C) Austin, Texas. As usual, I’ll provide a synopsis of the conference in a little bit, but I have some rather worrisome reports about the marine park process in Australia with which to regale you first.

My last post was the reproduction of a letter cosigned by over 150 marine scientists (mostly from Australia, including me) who are concerned that the a proposed network of marine reserves in the Commonwealth waters of the South West bioregional marine planning region is not based on sound scientific principles, and is instead a mash-up of what amounts to leftovers that industry hasn’t yet found a way to exploit. Not the best way to plan for marine biodiversity conservation in the long run.

After the post went live, I had a few interesting (and frightening) e-mail exchanges with a few colleagues who work for various Australian marine science institutions who complained that they were forbidden to cosign the letter. What? What? What? What? What? Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, climate change, conservation, environmental policy, marine, marine protected area, MPA, protected area

More than leftovers: getting marine parks right in Australia

7 08 2011
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Image via Wikipedia

A few weeks back I cosigned a ‘statement of concern’ about the proposal for Australia’s South West Marine Region organised by Hugh Possingham. The support has been overwhelming by Australia’s marine science community (see list of supporting scientists below). I’ve reproduced the letter addressed to the Australian government – distribute far and wide if you give more than a shit about the state of our marine environment (and the economies it supports). Basically, the proposed parks are merely a settlement between government and industry where nothing of importance is really being protected. The parks are just the leftovers industry doesn’t want. No way to ensure the long-term viability of our seas.

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On 5 May 2011 the Australian Government released a draft proposal for a network of marine reserves in the Commonwealth waters of the South West bioregional marine planning region.

Australia’s South West is of global significance for marine life because it is a temperate region with an exceptionally high proportion of endemic species – species found nowhere else in the world.

Important industries, such as tourism and fisheries, depend on healthy marine ecosystems and the services they provide. Networks of protected areas, with large fully protected core zones, are essential to maintain healthy ecosystems over the long-term – complemented by responsible fisheries management1.

The selection and establishment of marine reserves should rest on a strong scientific foundation. We are greatly concerned that what is currently proposed in the Draft South West Plan is not based on the three core science principles of reserve network design: comprehensiveness, adequacy and representation. These principles have been adopted by Australia for establishing our National Reserve System and are recognized internationally2.

Specifically, the draft plan fails on the most basic test of protecting a representative selection of habitats within the bioregions of the south-west. There are no highly protected areas proposed at all in three of the seven marine bioregions lying on the continental shelf3. Overall less than 3.5% of the shelf, where resource use and biodiversity values are most intense, is highly protected. Further, six of the seven highly protected areas that are proposed on the shelf are small (< 20 km in width)4 and all are separated by large distances (> 200 km)5. The ability of such small isolated areas to maintain connectivity and fulfil the goal of protecting Australia’s marine biodiversity is limited. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, biogeography, coasts, conservation, conservation biology, coral reefs, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, marine, marine protected area, MPA, protected area, southern Australia

Taxonomy in the clouds

4 07 2011

Another post (see previous here, here and here) by my aspiring science-communicator PhD student, Salvador Herrando-Pérez.

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Taxonomy uses rigorous rules of nomenclature to classify living beings, so every known species has a given ‘name’ and ‘surname’. The revision of certain taxonomic groups (particularly through genetic analyses) is favouring the proliferation of nominally new species, often propelled by virtue of their charisma and conservation status.

In secondary school, most of my classmates associated the subject ‘Biology’ with unpronounceable Latin taxonomic names, with which all known living beings are branded — ‘Canis lupus’ reads the identity card of humanity’s best friend. When the Swedish monk Carl Linnaeus proposed such binomial nomenclature, he could hardly imagine that, two hundred years later, his terminology would underpin national and transnational budgets for species conservation. Taxonomic nomenclature allows the classification of species into clusters of the same kind (e.g., diatoms, amanitas, polychaetes, skinks), and the calculation of an indispensable figure for conservation purposes: how many species are there at a given location, range, country, continent, or the entire planet?

Traditionally, taxonomists described species by examining their (external and internal) morphological features, the widest consensus being that two individuals of different species could not hybridise. However, a practical objection to that thinking was that if, for instance, an ocean separated two leopard populations, ethics should prevent us from bringing them in contact only to check if they produce fertile offspring, hence justifying a common-species status. Genetics currently provides a sort of ‘remote check’.

New species, new names

Over the last three decades, the boom of genetics and the global modernisation of environmental policies have fostered alternative criteria to differentiate species, populations, and even individuals. As a result, experts have created a colourful lexicon to label management or conservation units or new taxonomical categories such as that of a subspecies1, e.g., Canis lupus dingo for the wild Australian dog (dingo). These changes have shaken the foundations of taxonomy because several definitions of species (biological, phylogenetic, evolutionary) are forced to live under the umbrella of a common nomenclature. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biodiversity, Borneo, conservation, dingo, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, genetics, Indonesia, IUCN, Red List, threatened species

Know thy threat

9 06 2011

Here’s another great guest post by Megan Evans of UQ – her previous post on resolving the environmentalist’s paradox was a real hit, so I hope you enjoy this one too.

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The reasons for the decline of Australia’s unique biodiversity are many, and most are well known. Clearing of vegetation for urban and agricultural land uses, introduced species and changed fire patterns are regularly cited in State of the Environment reports, recovery plans and published studies as major threats to biodiversity. But, while these threats are widely acknowledged, little has been done to quantify them in terms of the proportion of species affected, or their spatial extent at a national, state or local scale. To understand why such information on threats may be useful, consider for instance how resources are allocated in public health care1.

Threat knowledge

Conditions such as cancer, heart disease and mental health are regarded as National Health Priority Areas in Australia, and have been given special attention when prioritising funds since the late 1980s. The burden of disease in these priority areas are quantified according to the incidence or prevalence of disease or condition, and its social and economic costs. Estimates of burden of disease and their geographic distribution (often according to local government areas) can assist in communicating broad trends in disease burden, but also in prioritising efforts to achieve the best outcomes for public health. An approach similar to that used in healthcare could help to identify priorities for biodiversity conservation – using information on the species which are impacted by key threats, the spatial distributions of species and threats, and the costs of implementing specific management actions to address these threats. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : alien species, Australia, biodiversity, conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, extinction, fire, fox, habitat loss, harvest, health, invasive species, planning, threatened species

World Environment Day and Australian forest regeneration

5 06 2011

© WWF

As I retweeted ABC Environment‘s sentiment for a Happy Environment Day, I added that we have little to be happy about.

However, I am happy about one thing – we’ve recently received a large ARC Linkage Grant to look at best-practice forest regeneration techniques. The Environment Institute just put out a post on it, so I’ll let Adriana’s words do the talking.

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Sunday, 5 June is World Environment Day, this year’s theme is ‘Forests: Nature At Your Service’. Read on to find out how researchers at The Environment Institute are looking at ways of restoring our forests.

World Environment Day (WED) is an annual event that is aimed at being the biggest and most widely celebrated global day for positive environmental action. World Environment Day celebrations began in 1972 and has grown to become the one of the main vehicles through which the UN stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and encourages political attention and action. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, reforestation, research, restoration

Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss XII

30 05 2011

The latest six cartoons… (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

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Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biodiversity, cartoon, climate change, conservation, economics, environmental policy, logging

Infinite planet theory

24 05 2011

Rob Dietz over at the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) just e-mailed me and suggested I reproduce a recent post of theirs on ConservationBytes.com. Rob has produced a cracker – very funny, but ‘reality’ usually is. Many thanks, Rob, for a fine piece of writing.

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Few people have read the dense volumes published by the economist Milton Mountebank, but his work has affected you, me and every single person on the planet. Dr. Mountebank has revolutionized economic thought, and now he has been recognized for his singular efforts. Yesterday at a gala reception in Stockholm, Sweden, the chairman of Sveriges Riksbank, Peter Norborg, presented Dr. Mountebank with the Nobel Prize in Economics for his lifetime of work on infinite planet theory.

In his presentation of the award, Mr. Norborg stated, “Dr. Mountebank has demonstrated imagination and inventiveness beyond what the rational mind can comprehend.” Indeed, it is because of his theories that we all do what we do economically. Nations strive for continuous GDP growth and endless expansion of consumption thanks to infinite planet theory. Mr. Norborg went on to say, “All of our banks, including Sveriges Riksbank, owe him a huge debt. We finance economic expansion. Our actions and decisions would be morally suspect if we lived on a finite planet.”

In a light-hearted moment during the presentation, Mr. Norborg asserted that Dr. Mountebank had provided an even greater service to humanity by reducing stress on individuals. “Best of all,” he said, “is that we can extract, consume and digest resources guilt-free. Planetary constraints have been conquered. They have gone the way of the dodo, the Roman Empire and the world’s major fisheries.” Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : anthropocene, conservation, economics, ecosystem services, environmental economics, environmental policy

Getting conservation stakeholders involved

14 04 2011

© http://goo.gl/yeKwH

Here’s another guest post from another switched-on Queensland student, Duan Biggs. Duan, originally from Namibia and South Africa, is doing his PhD at the ARC Centre for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland. His PhD is investigating the resilience of nature-based tourism to climate change. I’ve met Duan a few times, and I’m impressed by his piercing views on conservation science and its implementation. Duan has already posted here on ConservationBytes.com (‘Make your conservation PhD relevant‘) and now adds his latest post discussing a paper he’s just had published in Conservation Letters. Thanks, Duan.

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Achieving conservation outcomes almost always means working with stakeholders. ConservationBytes readers who have participated in multi-stakeholder conservation processes will know how difficult they are. Even more so when parties come from very different backgrounds and cultures. Farmers feel they just cannot comprehend what scientists are saying… ecologists silently curse [CJAB's note: well, not always silently] because government officials ‘just don’t get it’ and so forth. So often, conservation projects are impeded, or even brought to a grinding halt because the very different perspectives that stakeholders bring to the table and the inability to see eye to eye.  This has left many a fervent conservationist and scientist feeling like the associated cartoon.

However, our new paper entitled The implementation crisis in conservation planning – could ‘mental models’ help? just out in Conservation Letters suggests ways of dealing with this almighty challenge.

Effective conservation requires conservation scientists to partner successfully with managers, extractive users and other stakeholder groups. Often, key stakeholders come from very different backgrounds and cultures, and hence have a diversity of values that result in a range of perspectives on issues. These differences are frequently a source of failure in conservation projects.

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Categories : conservation, environmental policy, environmental science, governance, research, science

Crocodiles, spiders and leeches

11 04 2011

I just wrote a fun little piece for a new section in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment that they’re calling Trails and Tribulations. The basic idea is that the author recounts a particularly interesting field-related experience through which an ecological concept is woven.

Editor-in-Chief Sue Silver said that I could reproduce my article here as long as I acknowledged Frontiers and the Ecological Society of America. It was fun to write, and I hope you enjoy it too [the PDF of the article is available free of charge here].

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“So does each team get a hand gun?”

“No, you get an oar”

“What good is an oar?”

“Listen, mate. When a 3-metre croc jumps out of the swamp at you, there is nothing more natural in the world than to thump him with a big stick. It’s an autonomous response. With a gun, IF you manage to keep it dry, and IF you manage to get it out in time before the croc bites off your head, chances are you’ll just shoot the bloke in front of you anyway. So you get an oar.”

“Fair enough”.

That is an approximate, paraphrased reproduction of the initial conversation I had with renowned Australian crocodile biologist, Grahame Webb, just prior to my first (and as it turns out, only) trip to collect crocodile eggs for his Darwin wildlife park and crocodile farm. I volunteered to take part in the collection because I had recently begun working with Grahame and his team tracking the world’s largest crocodile species – the saltwater or estuarine crocodile Crocodylus porosus – and modelling aspects of its populations (Bradshaw et al. 2006). Having already been out on several occasions to harpoon and satellite-tag animals (some measuring > 4 m) on the Mary River, and cage-trap others in Kakadu National Park, I thought a little egg collection would be a proverbial walk in the park. Little did I know that it would end up being one of my more memorable experiences.

Let me walk you through the process. First, you wait until the height of the wet season and drive out as far as you can toward the breeding swamp of interest (in this case, Melacca Swamp in the Adelaide River flood plain, about one hour’s drive from Darwin). Then you and two other loonies pile into a small helicopter equipped with landing pontoons which ferries you to one of many previously identified crocodile nests. Because there is usually too much vegetation around the nest itself, the helicopter must land about 100-300 m away. Clothed only in long pants, a long-sleeved shirt and cotton gloves to protect your skin from the slicing blade grass, you jump off the helicopter’s pontoons into impenetrably murky, chest-deep water. One of the team drags an esky (chiller box into which eggs will be placed) and another carries an oar. As the noise of the departing helicopter becomes a faint buzz, you suddenly realise via the rapid expansion of your terminal sphincter that you are in the middle of a crocodile-filled swamp – and you are holding an oar. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, celebrity, conservation, conservation biology, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, harvest, management, predator, research

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