Knowledge slavery

29 01 2012

Another workshop; another productive week.

As many readers will know, I’ve spent the last week in the mountains north of Madrid working on a series of conservation ecology papers with host Miguel Araújo (of the Integrative Biology and Global Change Group at the Spanish National Museum of Natural Sciences), my lab colleagues, Barry Brook, Damien Fordham and Salvador Herrando-Pérez, and Miguel’s post-doc, Regan Early.

Let me tell you, staying in the craggy granite Sierra de Guadarrama mountains at a well-known health spa eating explosively flavourful Spanish food and drinking an immodest selection of the region’s delicious wines, is particularly conducive to scientific productivity (yes, I AM a jammy tart). Although unlikely to be followed by many (even if they have the means), I highly recommend the experience for those suffering from writer’s block.

But this post isn’t about the scenery, food, wine, hydrothermal treatment or even the content of the workshop at all (I just prefaced it as such to gloat); it’s about a particularly sore point for me and hundreds of thousands of other scientists the world over – our slavery to the scientific publishing industry.

And ‘slavery’ is definitely the most appropriate term here, for how else would you describe a business where the product is produced by others for free1 (scientific results), is assessed for quality by others for free (reviewing), is commissioned, overviewed and selected by yet others for free (editing), and then sold back to the very same scientists and the rest of the world’s consumers at exorbitant prices.

This isn’t just a whinge about a specialised and economically irrelevant sector of the economy, we’re talking about an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. In fact, Elsevier (agreed by many to be the leader in the greed-pack – see how some scientists are staging their protest; also here) made US$1.1 billion in 2010! Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : conservation, economics, research, science, science communication, scientific publishing, scientific writing

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

Slicing the second ‘lung of the planet’

12 12 2011

© WWF

Apologies for the slow-down in postings this past week – as many of you know, I was attending the International Congress for Conservation Biology in Auckland. I’ll blog about the conference later (and the stoush that didn’t really occur), but suffice it to say it was very much worthwhile.

This post doesn’t have a lot to do per se with the conference, but it was stimulated by a talk I attended by Conservation Scholar Stuart Pimm. Now, Stuart is known mainly as a tropical conservation biologist, but as it turns out, he also is a champion of temperate forests – he even sits on the science panel of the International Boreal Conservation Campaign.

I too have dabbled in boreal issues over my career, and most recently with a review published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution on the knife-edge plight of boreal biodiversity and carbon stores. That paper was in fact the result of a brain-storming session Navjot Sodhi and I had one day during my visit to Singapore sometime in 2007. We thought, “It doesn’t really seem that people are focussing their conservation attention on the boreal forest; how bad is it really?”.

Well, it turns out that the boreal forest is still a vast expanse and that there aren’t too many species in imminent danger of extinction; however, that’s where the good news ends. The forest itself is becoming more and more fragmented from industrial development (namely, forestry, mining, petroleum surveying and road-building) and the fire regime has changed irrevocably from a combination of climate change and intensified human presence. You can read all these salient features here.

So, back to my original thread – Stuart gave a great talk on the patterns of deforestation worldwide, with particular emphasis on how satellite imagery hides much of the fine-scale damage that we humans do to the world’s great forests. It was when he said (paraphrased) that “50,000 km2 of boreal forest is lost each year, but even that statistic hides a major checkerboard effect” that my interest was peaked. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : habitat loss, climate change, biodiversity, research, deforestation, temperate, conservation, biosequestration, biocarbon, fragmentation, harvest, cartoon, reforestation, boreal, logging, conference

Rise of the phycologists

22 09 2011

Dead man's fingers (Codium fragile) - © CJA Bradshaw

I’ve had an interesting week. First, it’s been about 6 years since I was last in Japan, and I love coming here; the food is exquisite, the people are fantastic (polite, happy, accommodating), everything works (trains, buses, etc.) and most importantly, it has an almost incredible proportion of its native forests intact.

But it wasn’t for forests that I travelled to Japan (nor the sumo currently showing on the guest-room telly where I’m staying – love the sumo): I was here for a calcareous macroalgae workshop.

What?

First, what are ‘macroalgae’, and why are some ‘calcareous’? And why should anyone in their right mind care?

Good questions. Answers: 1. Seaweeds; 2. Many incorporate calcium carbonate into their structures as added structural support; 3. Read on.

Now, I’m no phycologist (seaweed scientist), but I’m fascinated by this particular taxon. I’ve written a few posts about their vital ecological roles (see here and here), but let me regale you with some other important facts about these amazing species.

Some Japanese macroalgae - © CJA Bradshaw

There are about 12,000 known species of macroalgae described by phycologists, but as I’ve learnt this week, this is obviously a vast underestimate. For most taxa that people are investigating now using molecular techniques, the genetic diversity is so high and so geographically structured that there are obviously a huge number of ‘cryptic’ species within our current taxonomic divisions. This could mean that we’re out by up to a factor of 2 in the number of species in the world.

Another amazing fact – about 50 % of all known seaweed species are found in just two countries – Japan and Australia (hence the workshop between Japanese and Australian phycologists). Southern Australia in particular is an endemism hotspot.

Ok. Cool. So far so good. But so what? Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : acidification, Asia, Australia, biodiversity, carbon, China, climate change, conference, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, endemism, fish, fisheries, habitat loss, harvest, hotspot, marine, research, southern Australia, The University of Adelaide

Life, death and Linneaus

9 07 2011

Barry Brook (left) and Lian Pin Koh (right) attacking Fangliang He (centre). © CJA Bradshaw

I’m sitting in the Brisbane airport contemplating how best to describe the last week. If you’ve been following my tweets, you’ll know that I’ve been sequestered in a room with 8 other academics trying to figure out the best ways to estimate the severity of the Anthropocene extinction crisis. Seems like a pretty straight forward task. We know biodiversity in general isn’t doing so well thanks to the 7 billion Homo sapiens on the planet (hence, the Anthropo prefix) - the question though is: how bad?

I blogged back in March that a group of us were awarded a fully funded series of workshops to address that question by the Australian Centre for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis (a Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network facility based at the University of Queensland), and so I am essentially updating you on the progress of the first workshop.

Before I summarise our achievements (and achieve, we did), I just want to describe the venue. Instead of our standard, boring, windowless room in some non-descript building on campus, ACEAS Director, Associate Professor Alison Specht, had the brilliant idea of putting us out away from it all on a beautiful nature-conservation estate on the north coast of New South Wales.

What a beautiful place – Linneaus Estate is a 111-ha property just a few kilometres north of Lennox Head (about 30 minutes by car south of Byron Bay) whose mission is to provide a sustainable living area (for a very lucky few) while protecting and restoring some pretty amazing coastal habitat along an otherwise well-developed bit of Australian coastline. And yes, it’s named after Carl Linnaeus. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Allee effect, anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, climate change, conference, conservation, coral reefs, deforestation, ecology, extinction, extinction debt, habitat loss, island biogeography, IUCN, mathematics, minimum viable population, research

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.

–

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

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.

–

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.

Read the rest of this entry »


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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

How fast are we losing species anyway?

28 03 2011

© W. Laurance

I’ve indicated over the last few weeks on Twitter that a group of us were recently awarded funding from the Australian Centre for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis – ACEAS – (much like the US version of the same thing – NCEAS) to run a series of analytical workshops to estimate, with a little more precision and less bias than has been done previously, the extinction rates of today’s biota relative to deep-time extinctions.

So what’s the issue? The Earth’s impressive diversity of life has experienced at least five mass extinction events over geological time. Species’ extinctions have kept pace with evolution, with more than 99 % of all species that have ever existed now gone (Bradshaw & Brook 2009). Despite general consensus that biodiversity has entered the sixth mass extinction event because of human-driven degradation of the planet, estimated extinction rates remain highly imprecise (from 100s to 10000s times background rates). This arises partly because the total number of species is unknown for many groups, and most extinctions go unnoticed.

So how are we going to improve on our highly imprecise estimates? One way is to look at the species-area relationship (SAR), which to estimate extinction requires one to extrapolate back to the origin in taxon- and region-specific SARs (e.g., with a time series of deforestation, one can estimate how many species would have been lost if we know how species diversity changes in relation to habitat area). Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : anthropocene, biogeography, conservation, deforestation, ecology, extinction, extinction debt, fragmentation, habitat loss, island biogeography, logging, modelling, research, species-area curve

What the hell is a banteng?

21 02 2011

A few years ago (ok, 6 years), ABC‘s Catalyst did a piece on our banteng research programme in Garig Gunak Barlu National Park in the Northern Territory. The show basically talks about the conservation and management conundrum of having a successful feral species in Australia that is also highly endangered in its native range (South East Asia). Do we shoot them all, or legislate them as an endangered species? It’s for Australians to decide.

I finally got around to uploading it on Youtube. I hope I haven’t contravened some copyright law, but I figure after such a lag, no one will care. I await the imminent contradiction from the ABC’s lawyers…

I hope you enjoy.

For the scientific papers arising from the work, see: Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, bushmeat, conservation, extinction, harvest, invasive species, management, population dynamics, research, science, tropical

More rain forest regeneration opportunities

5 10 2010

Last November I wrote about an exciting conservation research endeavour (see ‘How to restore a tropical rain forest‘)  in which I am involved called the Thiaki Rain Forest Regeneration Project taking place as we speak in the hinterland of north Queensland’s Atherton Tableland. I personally have done next to nothing on the project yet (UQ’s Margie Mayfield is leading the charge), so I can’t really update you on all the nitty-gritty of our progress. Regardless, I can say that some of the planting tests have been done, the species have been chosen and are growing happily in the nursery reading for planting in January 2011, and the baseline biodiversity assessments are well under way.

Well, prior to our Supercharge Your Science extravaganza in Cairns and Townsville a few weeks ago, I visited Penny & Noel at Thiaki for a catch up, a discussion of what’s been happening and what’s about to happen. It was a great weekend (the family came along too) with good food, wine, ticks and leeches (biodiversity in action), and I’m getting more and more excited about what this project will deliver over the coming years.

In the meantime, a couple of ‘opportunities’ have arisen; in other words – we need some good PhD students to tackle some outstanding issues with the project. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, conservation, ecosystem function, mammal, mycorrhiza, reforestation, research, restoration, tropical

Student opportunities with Australian Wildlife Conservancy

8 09 2010

A colleague of mine, Dr. Matt Hayward of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC), asked me to circulate some Honours, MSc and PhD student project opportunities. I thought this would be best done by publishing the call as a blog post.

The AWC is a non-government, non-profit organisation dedicated to the conservation of Australia’s wildlife and their habitats. AWC’s south-east region has a team of 7 ecologists who work closely with the land managers to carry out AWC’s Conservation and Science Program. The Science Program includes strategic research designed to help us manage threatened species more effectively. Several of these research projects are suitable for Honours, Masters or PhD projects.

This prospectus provides an outline of the student projects that are currently on offer in the south-east region. The majority of the projects are based on one sanctuary, although some aspects of the research may be done on other AWC sanctuaries and/or government conservation areas.

AWC will partially support these projects with equipment, staff time and expertise, and accommodation. In some cases, AWC may also provide some vehicle use and office facilities onsite at The Scotia Field Research Centre. We anticipate these projects will be collaborative efforts with input from students, academics and AWC staff, with appropriate acknowledgement for all involved. These projects are offered on a first in, first approved basis and have been offered to multiple universities.

More details on the sanctuaries and AWC are available here. If you are keen do one of these projects, please contact Matt Hayward and we will then formulate a research proposal and research agreement. Eight project descriptions follow. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, cat, conservation, dingo, fox, invasive species, monitoring, predator, protected area, research, South Australia, southern Australia, threatened species

Webinar: Modelling water and life

27 08 2010

Another quick one today just to show the webinar of my recent 10-minute ‘Four in 40′ talk sponsored by The Environment Institute and the Department for Water. This seminar series was entitled ‘Modelling as a Tool for Decision Support’ held at the Auditorium, Royal Institution Australia (RiAus).

“Four in 40″ is a collaboration between The University of Adelaide and the Department for Water, where 4 speakers each speak for 10 minutes on their research and its implications for policy. The purpose is to build understanding of how best to work with each other, build new business for both organisations and raise awareness of activity being undertaken in water/natural resource management policy and research.

CJA Bradshaw


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Categories : anthropocene, biodiversity, biogeography, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, deforestation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, habitat loss, health, island biogeography, management, marine protected area, mathematics, minimum viable population, modelling, protected area, research, The University of Adelaide, threatened species

Long, deep and broad

24 08 2010

© T. Holub Flickr

Thought that would get your attention ;-)

“More scientists need to be trained in quantitative synthesis, visualization and other software tools.” D. Peters (2010)

In fact, that is part of the title of today’s focus paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution by D. Peters – Accessible ecology: synthesis of the long, deep,and broad.

As a ‘quantitative’ ecologist (modeller, numerate, etc.) whose career has been based to a large degree on the analysis of large ecological datasets, I am certainly singing Peters’ tune. However, it’s much deeper and more important than my career – good (long, deep, broad – see definitions below) ecological data are ESSENTIAL to avoid some of the worst ravages of biodiversity loss over the coming decades and centuries. Unfortunately, investment in long-term ecological studies is poor in most countries (Australia is no exception), and it’s not improving.

But why are long-term ecological data essential? Let’s take a notable example. Climate change (mainly temperature increases) measured over the last century or so (depending on the area) has been determined mainly through the analysis of long-term records. This, one of the world’s most important (yet sadly, not yet even remotely acted upon) issues today, derives from relatively simple long-term datasets. Another good example is the waning of the world’s forests (see posts here, here and here for examples) and our increasing political attention on what this means for human society. These trends can only be determined from long-term datasets.

For a long time the dirty word ‘monitoring’ was considered the bastion of the uncreative and amateur – ‘real’ scientists performed complicated experiments, whereas ‘monitoring’ was viewed mainly as a form of low-intellect showcasing to please someone somewhere that at least something was being done. I’ll admit, there are many monitoring programmes producing data that aren’t worth the paper their printed on (see a good discussion of this issue in ‘Monitoring does not always count‘), but I think the value of good monitoring data has been mostly vindicated. You see, many ecological systems are far too complex to manipulate easily, or are too broad and interactive to determine much with only a few years of data; only by examining over the ‘long’ term do patterns (and the effect of extremes) sometimes become clear.

But as you’ll see, it’s not just the ‘long’ that is required to determine which land- and sea-use decisions will be the best to minimise biodiversity loss – we also need the ‘deep’ and the ‘broad’. But first, the ‘long’. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : climate change, connectivity, conservation, deforestation, ecological literacy, ecosystem function, environmental policy, environmental science, monitoring, research, science, science communication

August issue of Conservation Letters and more citation statistics

3 08 2010

Trash fish © A. Lobo

The latest issue (Volume 3, Issue 4 – August 2010) of Conservation Letters is now available free-of-charge online. This issue’s papers include 1 Mini-Review, 2 Policy Perspectives, 6 Letters, 1 Correspondence and 1 Response:


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Categories : conservation, conservation biology, research, scientific publishing

Where in the world to invest in plant conservation

31 05 2010

© CBD

It’s been a good few weeks with many of our papers coming out online early – for example, I highlighted one last week on ecosystem function breakdown from global warming.

Although this has been out for a few weeks, our new paper lead by PhD candidate Xingli Giam (formerly of National University of Singapore, recently completed Australian Endeavour Scholar, now at Princeton University and all-round up-and-coming research star), and with contributions from Hugh “Vascular” Tan and Navjot Sodhi of National University of Singapore and me, is entitled Future habitat loss and the conservation of plant biodiversity (just published online in Biological Conservation).

This one is a bit of a complicated one, so let me walk you through it.

Plants not only represent a huge component of global biodiversity (~320 000 species), they represent the ‘habitats’ in which animals live and provide the major source of nutrients to food webs. They also provide most of our food and other materials essential for human existence. Basically we’d be screwed without them.

Because so many of the world’s biomes are severely threatened now because of massive habitat loss, degradation, over-exploitation, invasive species, extinction synergies and climate change, we need to maximise our efficiency in protecting what’s left. While global prioritisation schemes have a fruitful scientific history since Myers & colleagues’ classic paper (see Biodiversity Hotspots), there are a number of problems that plague the concept and its implementation. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : conservation, deforestation, extinction, habitat loss, modelling, planning, prioritisation, research, reserve, species-area curve

Bill Laurance coming to Adelaide

13 03 2010

We’ve got a real treat for biodiversity buffs scheduled for the end of March. Eminent (Distinguished, Famous, Respected… the list goes on) Professor William (Bill) Laurance is briefly leaving his tropical world and coming south to the temperate climes of Adelaide to regale us with his fascinating biodiversity research career.

Bill is a leading conservation biologist who has worked internationally on many high-profile threats to tropical forests—in the Amazon, Central America, Africa, and Australasia. A highly prolific scientist, to date he has published five books and over 300 scientific articles. Bill has recently commenced a position as Distinguished Research Professor at James Cook University and is involved with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He also happens to be the bloke that blew the lid open on the devastating effects of tropical fragmentation in the Amazon with some of the best long-term experiments ever done in conservation biology.

I’m personally very pleased for several reasons: (1) Although I have never met Bill in person yet, I’ve recently co-authored two papers with him (Wash and spin cycle threats to tropical biodiversity and Improving the performance of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil for nature conservation) and I’m keen to meet the man behind the pen; (2) we have had many email discussions (some of them rather heated!), so I’m keen to flesh some of these out over a nice glass of South Australian Shiraz; (3) he’s been a keen supporter of my work for years, and has given me many opportunities to get my research noticed; and (4) it’s high time to met one of ConservationBytes.com Conservation Scholars.

Bill has recently shifted shop from Panama (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) to Australia’s own James Cook University, and so we at the Environment Institute thought we should take advantage of his geographical disorientation and bring him down south for a while. But he’s going to have to sing for his supper, so he’s kindly agreed to give three talks in 3 days from 29-31 March 2010.

His first talk (on Monday 29 March) will be an in-house Environment Institute seminar, but the second two will be public events that I urge anyone remotely interested in biodiversity conservation research to attend. In fact, his Tuesday 30 March presentation (18.00-20.00 Napier G03, University of Adelaide) is even more generic than that, and word on the street is it is highly entertaining and extremely well attended wherever Bill’s is gracious enough to give it:

Amplify Your Voice: Keys to Having a Prolific Scientific Career (and Bill would know).

This will include (1) How to be more prolific: strategies for writing and publishing scientific papers and (2) Further ways to maximise your scientific impact – interacting with the popular media and how to promote yourself. Each topic will run for 50 minutes and will include 10 minutes for audience questions. A tea and coffee break will be held between sessions. Book here.

His second public talk on Wednesday 31 March (18.00-19.30 Napier 102, University of Adelaide) will be:

Diagnosis Critical | The lungs of our Planet

Here he will be discussing how the forests of our world are in crisis. Our drive for continued economic growth has had devastating consequences for the world’s ecosystems that provide critical human services. Our forests are a haven for countless plant and animal species that form the basis of ecological services, these services are the biological mechanisms that make the world our home. Book here.

So, if you have a couple of free nights at the end of the month and are in Adelaide, I strongly recommend you come out and see Bill do his thing.

CJA Bradshaw

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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, Central America, conservation biology, conservation scholars, deforestation, environmental policy, fragmentation, habitat loss, logging, rain forests, REDD, research, South America, tropical

February Issue of Conservation Letters

13 02 2010

Diver at Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Hard to believe we’re already at Volume 3 – introducing the latest issue of Conservation Letters (Volume 3, Issue 1, February 2010). For full access, click here.

Note too we’ve jumped from 5 to 6 papers per issue. Congratulations to all our authors. Keep those submissions coming!

CJA Bradshaw

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Categories : coasts, conservation, coral reefs, deforestation, environmental policy, invasive species, logging, planning, prioritisation, protected area, REDD, research, reserve, tourism, tropical

Scoping the future threats and solutions to biodiversity conservation

4 12 2009

Way back in 1989, Jared Diamond defined the ‘evil quartet’ of habitat destruction, over-exploitation, introduced species and extinction cascades as the principal drivers of modern extinctions. I think we could easily update this to the ‘evil quintet’ that includes climate change, and I would even go so far as to add extinction synergies as a the sixth member of the ‘evil sextet’.

But the future could hold quite a few more latent threats to biodiversity, and a corresponding number of potential solutions to its degradation. That’s why Bill Sutherland of Cambridge University recently got together with some other well-known scientists and technology leaders to do a ‘horizon scanning’ exercise to define what these threats and solutions might be in the immediate future. It’s an interesting, eclectic and somewhat enigmatic list, so I thought I’d summarise it here. The paper is entitled A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2010 and was recently published online in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

In no particular order or relative rank, Sutherland and colleagues list the following 15 ‘issues’ that I’ve broadly divided into ‘Emerging Threats’ and ‘Potential Solutions’:

Emerging Threats

  1. Microplastic pollution – The massive increase in plastics found in the world’s waterways and oceans really doesn’t have much focus right now in conservation research, but it should. We really don’t know how much we’re potentially threatening species with this source of pollution.
  2. Nanosilver in wastewater – The ubiquity of antimicrobial silver oxide or ions in products these days needs careful consideration for what the waste might be doing to our microbial communities that keep ecosystems alive and functioning.
  3. Stratospheric aerosols – A simultaneous solution and threat. Creating what would in effect be an artificial global cooling by injecting particles like sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere might work to cool the planet down somewhat. However, it would not reduce carbon dioxide, ocean acidification or other greenhouse gas-related changes. This strikes me as a potential for serious mucking up of the global climate and only a band-aid solution to the real problem.
  4. Deoxygenation of the oceans – Very scary. Ironically today I was listening to a talk by Martin Kennedy on the deep-time past of ocean hypoxia and he suggests we’re well on our way to a situation where our shelf waters could essentially become too anoxic for marine life to persist. It’s happened before, and rapid climate change makes the prospect plausible within less than a century. And you thought acidification was scary.
  5. Changes in denitrifying bacteria – Just like we’re changing the carbon cycle, we’re buggering up the nitrogen cycle as well. Changing our water bodies to nitrogen sources rather than sinks could fundamentally change marine ecosystems for the worse.
  6. High-latitude volcanism – One of these horrible positive feedback ideas. Reducing high-latitude ice cover exposes all these slumbering volcanoes that once ‘released’, start increasing atmospheric gas concentrations and contributing to faster ice melt and sea level rise.
  7. Trans-Arctic dispersal and colonisation – Warming polar seas and less ice mean fewer barriers to species movements. Expect Arctic ecosystems to be a hotbed of invasion, regime shifts and community reshuffling as a result.
  8. Invasive Indo-Pacific lionfish – Not one I would have focussed on, but interesting. These spiny, venomous fish like to eat a lot of other species, and so represent a potentially important invasive species in the marine realm.
  9. REDD and non-forested ecosystems – Heralded as a great potential coup for forest preservation and climate change mitigation, focussing on maintaining forests for their carbon sequestration value might divert pressure toward non-forested habitats and ironically, threaten a whole new sphere of species.
  10. International land acquisition – Global financial crises and dwindling food supplies mean that governments are acquiring more and more huge tracts of land for agricultural development. While this might solve some immediate issues, it could potentially threaten a lot more undeveloped land in the long run, putting even more pressure on habitats.

Potential Solutions

  1. Synthetic meat – Ever thought about eating a sausage grown in a vat rather than cut from a dead pig? It could become the norm and a way of reducing the huge pressure on terrestrial and aquatic systems for the production of livestock and fish for human protein provision.
  2. Artificial life – Both a risk and a potential solution. While I’ve commented before on the pointlessness of cloning technology for conservation, the ability to create genomes and reinvigorate species on the brink is an exciting prospect. It’s also frightening as hell because we don’t know how all these custom-made genomes might react and transform naturally evolved ones.
  3. Biochar – Burn organic material (e.g., plant matter) in the absence of oxygen, you get biochar. This essentially sequesters a lot of carbon that can then be put underground. The upshot is that agricultural yields can also increase. Would there be a trade-off though between land available for biochar sequestration and natural habitats?
  4. Mobile-sensing technology – Not so much a solution per se, but the rapid acceleration of remote technology will make our ability to measure and predict the subtleties of ecosystem and climate change much more precise. A lot more work and application required here.
  5. Assisted colonisation – I’ve blogged about this before. With such rapid shifts in climate, we might be obliged to move species around so that they can keep up with rapidly changing conditions. Many pros and cons here, not least of which is exacerbating the invasive species problems around the globe.

Certainly some interesting ideas here and worth a thought or two. I wonder if the discipline of ‘conservation biology’ might even exist in 50-100 years – we might all end up being climate or agricultural engineers with a focus on biodiversity-friendly technology. Who knows?

CJA Bradshaw

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ResearchBlogging.orgSutherland, W., Clout, M., Côté, I., Daszak, P., Depledge, M., Fellman, L., Fleishman, E., Garthwaite, R., Gibbons, D., & De Lurio, J. (2009). A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2010 Trends in Ecology & Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2009.10.003


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Categories : acidification, agriculture, alien species, aquaculture, Arctic, biocarbon, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, cloning, conservation, deforestation, environmental engineering, fish, fisheries, habitat loss, invasive species, marine, pollution, research, threatened species, trophic cascades

Sleuthing the Chinese green slime monster

21 10 2009

greenslimemonsterI just returned from a week-long scientific mission in China sponsored by the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I was invited to attend a special symposium on Marine and Deltaic Systems where research synergies between Australian and Chinese scientists were to be explored. The respective academies really rolled out the red carpet for the 30 or so Australian scientists on board, so I feel very honoured to have been invited.

During our marine workshop, one of my Chinese counterparts, Dongyan Liu from the Yantai Institute for Coastal Zone Research, presented a brilliant piece of ecological sleuthing that I must share with readers of ConservationBytes.com.

The first time you go to China the thing that strikes you is that everything is big – big population, big cities, big buildings, big projects, big budgets and big, big, big environmental problems. After many years of overt environmental destruction in the name of development, the Chinese government (aided by some very capable scientists) is now starting to address the sins of the past.

Liu and colleagues published their work earlier this year in Marine Pollution Bulletin in a paper entitled World’s largest macroalgal bloom caused by expansion of seaweed aquaculture in China, which describes a bloody massive outbreak of a particularly nasty ‘green tide’.

What’s a ‘green tide’? In late June 2008 in the coastal city of Qingdao not far from Beijing (and just before the 2008 Olympics), a whopping 1 million tonnes of green muck washed up along approximately 400 km2 of coastline. It took 10,000 volunteers 2 weeks to clean up the mess. At the time, many blamed the rising eutrophication of coastal China as the root cause, and a lot of people got their arse kicked over it. However, the reality was that it wasn’t so simple.

The Yellow Sea abutting this part of the Chinese coast is so named because of its relatively high productivity. Warm waters combined with good mixing mean that there are plenty of essential nutrients for green things to grow. So, adding thousands of tonnes of fertilisers from Chinese agricultural run-off seems like a logical explanation for the bloom.

Qingdoa green tide 2008 © Elsevier

Qingdao green tide 2008 © Elsevier

However, it turns out that the bulk of the green slime was comprised of a species called Enteromorpha prolifera, and it just so happens that this particularly unsavoury seaweed loves to grow on the infrastructure used for the aquaculture of nori (a.k.a. amanori or zicai) seaweed (mainly, Porphyra yezoensis). Problem is, P. yezoensis is grown mainly on the coast hundreds of kilometres to the south.

Liu and colleagues examined both satellite imagery and detailed oceanographic data from the period prior to the green tide and not only spotted green splotches many kilometres long, they also determined that the current flow and wind direction placed the trajectory of any green slime mats straight for Qingdao.

So, how does it happen? Biofouling by E. prolifera on P. yezoensis aquaculture frames is dealt with mainly by manual cleaning and then dumping the unwanted muck on the tidal flats. When the tide comes back in, it washes many thousands of kilos of this stuff back out to sea, which then accumulates in rafts and continues to grow in the warm, rich seas. Subsequent genetic work also confirmed that the muck at sea was the same stock as the stuff growing on the aquaculture frames.

Apart from some lovely sleuthing work, the implications are pretty important from a biodiversity perspective. Massive eutrophication coupled with aquaculture that inadvertently spawns a particularly nasty biofouling species is a good recipe for oxygen depletion in areas where the eventual slime monster starts to decay. This can lead to so-called ‘dead’ zones that can kill off huge numbers of marine species. So, the proper management of aquaculture in the hungry Goliath that is China becomes essential to reduce the incidence of dead zones.

Fortunately, it looks like Liu and colleagues’ work is being taken seriously by the Chinese government who is now contemplating financial support for aquaculturists to clean their infrastructure properly without dumping the sludge to sea. A simple policy shift could save a lot of species, a lot of money, and a lot of embarrassment (not to mention prevent a lot of bad smells).

CJA Bradshaw

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This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.org

ResearchBlogging.orgLiu, D., Keesing, J., Xing, Q., & Shi, P. (2009). World’s largest macroalgal bloom caused by expansion of seaweed aquaculture in China Marine Pollution Bulletin, 58 (6), 888-895 DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2009.01.013


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Categories : algae, aquaculture, Asia, China, coasts, conservation, environmental policy, eutrophication, marine, research

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