Influential conservation ecology papers of 2019

24 12 2019

Bradshaw-Waves breaking on rocks Macquarie Island
As I’ve done for the last six years, I am publishing a retrospective list of the ‘top’ 20 influential papers of 2019 as assessed by experts in F1000 Prime (in no particular order). See previous years’ lists here: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.

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Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, biogeography, biowealth, birds, carbon, climate change, climate shift, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, deforestation, demography, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, fish, fisheries, function, habitat loss, harvest, marine, planning, pollution, protected area

Does high exposure on social and traditional media lead to more citations?

18 12 2019

social mediaOne of the things that I’ve often wondered about is whether making the effort to spread your scientific article’s message as far and wide as possible on social media actually brings you more citations.

While there’s more than enough justification to promote your work widely for non-academic purposes, there is some doubt as to whether the effort reaps academic awards as well.

Back in 2011 (the Pleistocene of social media in science), Gunther Eysenbach examined 286 articles in the obscure Journal of Medical Internet Research, finding that yes, highly cited papers did indeed have more tweets. But he concluded:

Social media activity either increases citations or reflects the underlying qualities of the article that also predict citations …

Subsequent work has established similar positive relationships between social-media exposure and citation rates (e.g., for 208739 PubMed articles; > 10000 blog posts of articles published in > 20 journals), weak relationships (e.g., using 27856 PLoS One articles; based on 1380143 articles from PubMed in 2013), or none at all (e.g., for 130 papers in International Journal of Public Health).

While the research available suggests that, on average, the more social-media exposure a paper gets, the more likely it is to be cited, the potential confounding problem raised by Eysenbach remains — are interesting papers that command a lot of social-media attention also those that would garner scientific interest anyway? In other words, are popular papers just popular in both realms, meaning that such papers are going to achieve high citation rates anyway?

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Categories : blog, conservation, science communication, scientific publishing

Did people or climate kill off the megafauna? Actually, it was both

10 12 2019

When freshwater dried up, so did many megafauna species.
Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Author provided

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Earth is now firmly in the grips of its sixth “mass extinction event”, and it’s mainly our fault. But the modern era is definitely not the first time humans have been implicated in the extinction of a wide range of species.

In fact, starting about 60,000 years ago, many of the world’s largest animals disappeared forever. These “megafauna” were first lost in Sahul, the supercontinent formed by Australia and New Guinea during periods of low sea level.

The causes of these extinctions have been debated for decades. Possible culprits include climate change, hunting or habitat modification by the ancestors of Aboriginal people, or a combination of the two.

Read more: What is a ‘mass extinction’ and are we in one now?

The main way to investigate this question is to build timelines of major events: when species went extinct, when people arrived, and when the climate changed. This approach relies on using dated fossils from extinct species to estimate when they went extinct, and archaeological evidence to determine when people arrived.

Read more: An incredible journey: the first people to arrive in Australia came in large numbers, and on purpose

Comparing these timelines allows us to deduce the likely windows of coexistence between megafauna and people.

We can also compare this window of coexistence to long-term models of climate variation, to see whether the extinctions coincided with or shortly followed abrupt climate shifts.

Data drought

One problem with this approach is the scarcity of reliable data due to the extreme rarity of a dead animal being fossilised, and the low probability of archaeological evidence being preserved in Australia’s harsh conditions. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, climate change, climate shift, conservation, decline, exploitation, extinction, mathematics, modelling, palaeo-ecology, southern Australia, synergies, top-down ecology, water

Adult disguises

2 12 2019

Skilled ornithologists can tell the age of a bird by the look of its feathers. But many species are advancing the moult of their first adult plumage in response to global warming, and the youngsters look more similar to the adults now than two centuries ago.

R Graphics Output

The clothes don’t make the (wo)man, but how we dress sends out a lot of information about our tastes, emotional state, or financial situation. In nature, where species have evolved to exploit all kinds of physical and chemical cues, visual communication determines a wealth of feeding and reproductive strategies (1).

Birds are familiar to all of us by the beauty and variety of their plumages (see extreme examples commented by David Attenborough here, here and here), which bird fans use to tell juveniles from males, males from females and breeders from migrants. In evolutionary time, birds have gradually moved away from tree-bark browns and tree-leaf greens and, due to functional requirements, modern feathers only span about one third of the colours these animals can perceive (2). They obtain yellows, oranges, and reds from carotenoid-containing food, dark colours from melanin pigment of own synthesis, and the so-called structural colours depend on how light reflects on the barbs of the feathers (2).

Plumage, across its entire range of designs, is a factor crucial to the life history of our feathery friends and, consequently, to evaluate how and how much anthropogenic climate change is impacting them (3).

Plumage and temperature

We know that mammals and birds are modifying their fur and feathers to optimise camouflage against landscapes with more or less snow (4), but less-known are the implications of climate change for feather moulting. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : anthropocene, behaviour, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, ecology, invasive species

Climate change and humans together pushed Australia’s biggest beasts to extinction

25 11 2019

people-megafaunaOver the last 60,000 years, many of the world’s largest species disappeared forever. Some of the largest that we generally call ‘megafauna’ were first lost in Sahul — the super-continent formed by the connection of Australia and New Guinea during periods of low sea level. The causes of these extinctions have been heavily debated for decades within the scientific community.

Three potential drivers of these extinctions have been suggested. The first is climate change that assumes an increase in arid conditions that eventually became lethal to megafauna. The second proposed mechanism is that the early ancestors of Aboriginal people who either hunted megafauna species to extinction, or modified ecosystems to put the largest species at a disadvantage. The third and most nuanced proposed driver of extinction is the combination of the first two.

The primary scientific tools we scientists use to determine which of these proposed causes of extinction have the most support are dated fossil records from the extinct species themselves, as well as archaeological evidence from early Aboriginal people. Traditionally, the main way we use these data is to construct a timeline of when the last fossil of a species was preserved, and compare this to evidence indicating when people arrived. We can also reconstruct climate patterns back tens of thousands of years using models similar to the ones used today to predict future climates. Based on the comparison of all of these different timelines, we conclude that abrupt climate changes in the past were influential if they occurred at or immediately before a recorded extinction event. On the other hand, if megafauna extinctions occur immediately after humans are thought to have arrived, we attribute more weight to human arrival as a driver.

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Categories : Australia, climate change, climate shift, conservation, ecology, extinction, palaeo-ecology, southern Australia, statistics, top-down ecology

Logbook of Australia’s ancient megafauna

20 11 2019

FosSahul_transparent_larger

Australia is home to some of the most unique species worldwide, including egg-laying mammals, tree-climbing, desert-bouncing and and burrow-digging marsupials, and huge flightless birds. While these animals are fascinating, the creatures that used to roam Australia’s landscape thousands of years ago were even more remarkable — these included wombat-like beasts as big as rhinos, birds more than two metres tall, lizards more than seven metres long, and a marsupial lion as big as a leopard.

Just how and why these animals went extinct has been challenging scientists for decades. But examining dated fossil records is one of the primary ways we can look into the past. The ever-increasing number of fossils and the advances in dating techniques have produced a wealth of material we can use to reconstruct the long-lost past.

DiprotodonEven with these data, it has been a struggle to gather enough fossils for large-scale analyses because reports of these records are usually scattered across the scientific literature, with no standardised quality control to make them comparable to each other. Designing a way to standardise these records is therefore important to avoid misleading conclusions.

The FosSahul database was first established in 2016 to try to alleviate these problems — it gathered all the fossil specimens for large animals (excluding humans) from the Late Quaternary (up to ~ 1 million years before present) across the region known as ‘Sahul’, the combined super-continent that included New Guinea and Australia when sea levels were much lower than they are today.

While FosSahul was an important step, the database needed to be updated. First, the quality rating of the fossil dates in the original version was a little subjective and lacked transparency in some cases. This is because the database did not capture enough detail to be able to reproduce all the steps leading to a particular quality rating. Second, given that new fossils are discovered regularly, updates are necessary to include the latest research. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, palaeo-ecology

What is a ‘mass extinction’ and are we in one now?

13 11 2019

(reproduced from The Conversation)

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For more than 3.5 billion years, living organisms have thrived, multiplied and diversified to occupy every ecosystem on Earth. The flip side to this explosion of new species is that species extinctions have also always been part of the evolutionary life cycle.

But these two processes are not always in step. When the loss of species rapidly outpaces the formation of new species, this balance can be tipped enough to elicit what are known as “mass extinction” events.

Read more: Climate change is killing off Earth’s little creatures

A mass extinction is usually defined as a loss of about three quarters of all species in existence across the entire Earth over a “short” geological period of time. Given the vast amount of time since life first evolved on the planet, “short” is defined as anything less than 2.8 million years.

Since at least the Cambrian period that began around 540 million years ago when the diversity of life first exploded into a vast array of forms, only five extinction events have definitively met these mass-extinction criteria.

These so-called “Big Five” have become part of the scientific benchmark to determine whether human beings have today created the conditions for a sixth mass extinction.

An ammonite fossil found on the Jurassic Coast in Devon. The fossil record can help us estimate prehistoric extinction rates. Corey Bradshaw, Author provided

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Categories : biodiversity, climate change, climate shift, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, development, ecology, evolution, extinction, extinction debt, extinction vortex, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, invasive species, living dead, speciation, sustainability, synergies, threatened species

Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss LVII

6 11 2019

The sixth set of six biodiversity cartoons for 2019. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.

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The politics of environmental destruction

22 10 2019

C_SE 409521698 Paul Ehrlich Lecture Event - Eventbrite2

You’d think I’d get tired of this, wouldn’t you? Alas, the fight does wear me down, but I must persist.

My good friend and colleague, the legendary Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, as well as his equally legendary wife, Anne, will be joining us in Adelaide for a brief visit during their annual southern migration.

Apart from just catching up over a few good bottles of wine (oh, do those two enjoy fine wines!), we have the immense privilege of having Paul appear at two events while he’s in town.

I’m really only going to be talking about the second of the two events (the first is a Science Meets Parliament gig with me and many others at the South Australia Parliament on 12 November): a grand, public lecture and Q&A session held at Flinders University on Wednesday, 13 November.

Haven’t heard of Paul? Where have you been hiding? If by some miracle you haven’t, here’s a brief bio:

Paul Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies Emeritus, President of the Center for Conservation Biology, Department of Biology, Stanford University and Adjunct Professor, University of Technology, Sydney. He does research in population biology (includes ecology, evolutionary biology, behavior, and human ecology and cultural evolution). Ehrlich has carried out field, laboratory and theoretical research on a wide array of problems ranging from the dynamics and genetics of insect populations, studies of the ecological and evolutionary interactions of plants and herbivores, and the behavioral ecology of birds and reef fishes, to experimental studies of the effects of crowding on human beings and studies of cultural evolution, especially the evolution of norms. He is President of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere and is author and coauthor of more than 1100 scientific papers and articles in the popular press and over 40 books. He is best known to his efforts to alert the public to the many intertwined drivers that are pushing humanity toward a collapse of civilization – especially overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich, and lack of economic, racial, and gender equity. Ehrlich is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Entomological Society and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.  He is a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, an Honorary Member of the British Ecological Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.  Among his many other honours are the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Crafoord Prize in Population Biology and the Conservation of Biological Diversity (an explicit replacement for the Nobel Prize); a MacArthur Prize Fellowship; the Volvo Environment Prize; UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize; the Heinz Award for the Environment; the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement; the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences; the Blue Planet Prize;  the Eminent Ecologist award of the Ecological Society of America, the Margalef Prize in Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology. Prof Ehrlich has appeared as a guest on more than 1000 TV and radio programs; he also was a correspondent for NBC News. He has given many hundreds of public lectures in the past 50 years.

I hope your jaw just dropped.

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Respecting Aboriginal culture through language

16 10 2019

(originally posted on the GE.blog)

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GEL Logo KaurnaWhat’s in a name? Well, rather a lot, I think.

Names have meanings, and not just in the way that they tag people, places or objects. I am of the opinion that names go to the core of culture and personal identity in a way that our corporate/fast-food/market-driven society often fails to appreciate or espouse.

This is why we decided to seek cultural permission to have our lab’s name translated into the local Kaurna Language. Like many Aboriginal languages around Australia, Kaurna needs support, respect, and value among Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike if it is to survive. And to me, the extinction of even one language is akin to the extinction of a species. Gone forever, never to be renewed.

But some people probably do not understand why this is important, which was brought home to me last night when a good friend asked why we decided to seek permission to have the lab’s name translated.

“Well,”, I said, “whenever I travel to other countries where multiple languages are spoken, be that in New Zealand1, South Africa2, Canada3, or southern Finland4, almost every official building, place, object, or document has a translation in different languages of the region.”

“Why don’t we seem to do that in Australia very much?”, I said.

After all, it is, at the very least, a sign of respect and recognition of the rightful custodians of the places and land; it recognises that there isn’t only one culture that usurps all others, and that there is multiple meaning and value in that place or object. Read the rest of this entry »


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Victoria, please don’t aerial-bait dingoes

10 10 2019

Here’s a submission to Victoria’s proposed renewal of special permission from the Commonwealth to poison dingoes:

dingo with bait

08 October 2019

Honourable Lily D’Ambrosio MP
Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change
Level 16, 8 Nicholson Street, East Melbourne, VIC 3002

lily.dambrosio@parliament.vic.gov.au

cc:

The Hon Jaclyn Symes, Minister for Agriculture, Victoria

(jaclyn.symes@parliament.vic.gov.au)

Dr Sally Box, Threatened Species Commissioner

(ThreatenedSpeciesCommissioner@environment.gov.au)

The Hon Sussan Ley MP, Minister for Environment, Australia

(Farrer@aph.gov.au)

RE: RENEWAL OF AERIAL BAITING EXEMPTION IN VICTORIA FOR WILD DOG CONTROL USING 1080

Dear Minister,

The undersigned welcome the opportunity to comment on the proposed renewal of special permission from the Commonwealth under Sections 18 and 18A of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Commonwealth) to undertake aerial 1080 baiting in six Victorian locations for the management of ‘wild dogs’. This raises serious concerns for two species listed as threatened and protected in Victoria: (1) dingoes and (2) spot-tailed quolls (Dasyurus maculatus).

First, we must clarify that the terminology ‘wild dog’ is not appropriate when discussing wild canids in Australia. One of the main discussion points at the recent Royal Zoological Society of NSW symposium ‘Dingo Dilemma: Cull, Contain or Conserve’ was that the continued use of the terminology ‘wild dog’ is not justified because wild canids in Australia are predominantly dingoes and dingo hybrids, and not, in fact, feral domestic dogs. In Victoria, Stephens et al. (2015) observed that only 5 out of 623 wild canids (0.008%) sampled were feral domestic dogs with no evidence of dingo ancestry. This same study determined that 17.2% of wild canids in Victoria were pure or likely pure dingoes and 64.4% were hybrids with greater than 60% dingo ancestry. Additionally, comparative studies by Jones (1988, 1990 and 2009) observed that dingoes maintained a strong phenotypic identity in the Victorian highlands over time, and perceptively ‘wild dog’ like animals were more dingo than domestic dog.

As prominent researchers in predator ecology, biology, archaeology, cultural heritage, social science, humanities, animal behaviour and genetics, we emphasise the importance of dingoes in Australian, and particularly Victorian, ecosystems. Dingoes are the sole non-human, land-based, top predator on the Australian mainland. Their importance to the ecological health and resilience of Australian ecosystems cannot be overstated, from regulating wild herbivore abundance (e.g., various kangaroo species), to reducing the impacts of feral mesopredators (cats, foxes) on native marsupials (Johnson & VanDerWal 2009; Wallach et al. 2010; Letnic et al. 2012, 2013; Newsome et al. 2015; Morris & Letnic 2017). Their iconic status is important to First Nations people and to the cultural heritage of all Australians. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : alien species, Australia, biodiversity, cat, community ecology, conservation, decline, demography, dingo, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, environmental policy, extinction, fox, genetics, harvest, human-wildlife conflict, introgression, invasive species, mammal, management, meso-predator release, predation, predator, science, southern Australia, threatened species, top-down ecology, trophic cascades

Environmental damage kills children

1 10 2019

Yes, childrenairpollutionit’s a provocative title, I agree. But then again, it’s true.

But I don’t just mean in the most obvious ways. We already have good data showing that lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills children (especially in developing nations), that air pollution is a nasty killer of young children in particular, and now even climate change is starting to take its toll.

These aspects of child health aren’t very controversial, but when we talk about the larger suite of indicators of environmental ‘damage’, such as deforestation rates, species extinctions, and the overall reduction of ecosystem services, the empirical links to human health, and to children in particular, are far rarer.

This is why I’m proud to report the publication today of a paper on which I and team of wonderful collaborators (Sally Otto, Zia Mehrabi, Alicia Annamalay, Sam Heft-Neal, Zach Wagner, and Peter Le Souëf) have worked for several years.

I won’t lie — the path to publishing this paper was long and hard, I think mainly because it traversed so many different disciplines. But we persevered and today published the paper entitled ‘Testing the socioeconomic and environmental determinants of better child-health outcomes in Africa: a cross-sectional study among nations‘* in the journal BMJ Open.

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Categories : Africa, agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, corruption, deforestation, demography, development, economics, ecosystem services, environmental Kuznets curve, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, food, function, governance, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, investment, livestock, logging, modelling, pollution, poverty, Red List, societies, sustainability, threatened species, toxification, water

The Great Dying

30 09 2019

Here’s a presentation I gave earlier in the year for the Flinders University BRAVE Research and Innovation series:

There is No Plan(et) B — What you can do about Earth’s extinction emergency

Earth is currently experiencing a mass extinction brought about by, … well, … us. Species are being lost at a rate similar to when the dinosaurs disappeared. But this time, it’s not due to a massive asteroid hitting the Earth; species are being removed from the planet now because of human consumption of natural resources. Is a societal collapse imminent, and do we need to prepare for a post-collapse society rather than attempt to avoid one? Or, can we limit the severity and onset of a collapse by introducing a few changes such as removing political donations, becoming vegetarians, or by reducing the number of children one has?

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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, corruption, decline, deforestation, development, drought, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, education, environmental economics, environmental Kuznets curve, environmental policy, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, Flinders University, flood, food, fragmentation, function, governance, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, impact, invasive species, livestock, logging, management, modelling, palaeo-ecology, pollination, pollution, poverty, recovery, reforestation, research, restoration, science, sustainability, synergies, threatened species, trophic cascades, video

University rankings are questionable at best

23 09 2019

university-rankingMeasuring educational performance is difficult at any stage, especially since most school-level performance indicators are based on ‘standardised’ tests of a few select students in particular years. But if you think that is questionable, you can rest assured that it is a hell of a lot more objective and better quantified than how we rank our universities.

In fact, it is rather stunning how superficial the criteria are for ranking universities, for there are no standardised exams or measures of teaching quality that have been applied to a large-enough section of universities across the world to make any meaningful comparisons. Instead, we tend to rely on brute metrics like the number of high-level academic prizes that employees of a university have won, how many citations they received for their academic papers, and other, highly subjective survey questions regarding the perceived ‘reputation’ of an institution.

As a result, a sceptic might in fact think that all the existing metrics are utter nonsense, especially considering how much advertising from universities appears to be incorporated in the online literature (one could be justified in being concerned about the possibility of undue influence and corruption in this regard 🤔).

While there are many types of university rankings, possibly the three most-recognised and reported are the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the (Shanghai) Academic Ranking of World Universities, and the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) University Rankings. The first purports to Read the rest of this entry »


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Academic? You’re just a cash-hamster spinning a publisher’s profit wheel

9 09 2019

mindslaveI contend that publishing articles in nearly all peer-reviewed journals amounts to a form of intellectual slavery.

I defend my use of the word ‘slavery’ here, for how else would you describe a business where the product (scientific results) is produced by others (scientists) for free, is assessed for quality by others (reviewers) for free, is commissioned, overviewed and selected by yet others (editors) for free, and then sold back to the very same scientists and the rest of the world’s knowledge consumers at exorbitant prices? To make matters worse, most scientists have absolutely no idea how much their institutions pay for these subscriptions, so there is little consumer scrutiny passed from researcher to administrator. In 2015, Jason Schmitt of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York quoted Brian Nosek, Director of the Center for Open Science, to sum up the situation:

“Academic publishing is the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher. And the researcher has no idea how much anything costs. I, as the researcher, produce the scholarship and I want it to have the biggest impact possible and so what I care about is the prestige of the journal and how many people read it. Once it is finally accepted, since it is so hard to get acceptances, I am so delighted that I will sign anything  —  send me a form and I will sign it. I have no idea I have signed over my copyright or what implications that has — nor do I care, because it has no impact on me. The reward is the publication.”

Some journals go even beyond this sort of profiteering and also inflict ‘page charges’ of hundreds to thousands of US dollars on the authors for the privilege of having their work appear in that journal.

I am not just grumpy about what many might assume to be a specialised and irrelevant sector of the economy, because it is in fact an industry worth many billions of dollars annually. In fact, one of the biggest corporations, Reed-Elsevier*, made over £1.8 billion (nearly US$2.8 billion) in adjusted operating profit in 2015 (1). Other major publishing companies like Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Sage Publications, which with Reed-Elsevier collectively published more than half of all the academic papers published in 2013, make many billions in profit each year as well: Wiley-Blackwell took in US$965 million in revenue in 2016, Springer had a 2012 revenue of US$1.26 billion, and Sage Publications had a 2015 profit of $585 million. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : conservation, science writing, scientific publishing, scientific writing

Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss LVI

4 09 2019

The fifth set of six biodiversity cartoons for 2019. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.

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No, you won’t sacrifice scientific objectivity if you advocate

29 08 2019

marchforscience.png

Despite a lot of rather uninformed people out there who might view scientists as just flesh-covered automatons lacking the customary set of feelings, we are in fact normal human beings embedded in the same society as everyone else. We own houses, drive cars, have sex, have children, eat out in restaurants, drink, dance, vote, pay taxes and utilities, do sport, take vacations, see the doctor, laugh, cry, love, and all the rest of it.

As such, we have just as much stake in society as everyone else, and we are very much at the mercy of government policies, cultural norms, and other limitations that everyday life presents us. If we happen to discover through our research some aspect of our society that can be approved, does it suffice merely to publish the material within the academic literature and nebulously ‘hope’ someone else does some good with it?

It is a short, metaphysical step to entertain the idea of advocating for change more proactively than a random Tweet or a newspaper interview might imply. I appreciate that the ‘a’ word strikes fear and derision in the hearts of many scientists, for I too was once under the impression that it was not my job to advocate for anything beyond good scientific practice. Indeed, I practically insisted that my role was uniquely to develop the tools, collect the data, design the experiments, and elaborate the intricacies and complexities of the results to test hypotheses. No more. No less.

Even the thought of mimicking those placard-holding street protestors (my rather naïve impression of what an advocate looked like) used to revile me, for I had formed the (incorrect) opinion that any scientist who took up the protestor’s mantle had clearly abandoned her claim to be an intellectual.

In my view, once one crossed that intangible line into advocacy, the objectivity of all previous intellectual pursuits was immediately compromised, if not abandoned entirely. For me then, ‘advocacy’ equalled ‘subjectivity’, and that was not consistent with what I understood science to be.

I have since done a 180-degree turn on that innocent and narrow-minded perspective. First, I have since come to realise that true objectivity is beyond the reach of any human being, and that science can only provide the tools to reduce our innate subjectivity. As human beings, even scientists have all of our species’ weaknesses and limitations of perception, but science allows us to get as close to objectivity as is humanly possible. So, science is not the pursuit of objectivity per se; rather, it is the pursuit of subjectivity reduction. Errare humanum est. Read the rest of this entry »


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10 things I wish I knew before doing an Honours degree

19 08 2019

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE GE.BLOG

1*rIJq-egkw9wL-D9ZGsF54g

In 2018 I started my Honours degree in biodiversity and conservation at Flinders University. I had completed my Bachelor of Science in 2017, after being accepted in the Honours stream through my Year 12 Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR).

I will not sugar-coat it — I was a bad Bachelor student. I scarcely attended classes and at times submitted sub-par work. I believed that as long as I didn’t fail anything I would still be able to do my Honours, so I did the bare minimum and just got by. However in the last semester I discovered I needed an average GPA of 5.0 to secure my Honours position, regardless of what stream I was doing. Panic ensued, I was already too deep in my final semester of not achieving to pull my grades around. Thankfully, I was eventually accepted, after having to plead my case with the Honours board.

In the end I managed to score myself a First Class Honours and a PhD candidature (and hopefully soon a publication). Honours was definitely a struggle, but it was also one of the best experiences of my life. I just wish I had known these 10 things before I started …

1. You will fail

Not the brightest note to start on, but don’t fear, everyone fails. Honours is full of ups and downs, and at some point, somewhere along the line, something in your project will go wrong. But it’s okay! It happens to every person that has ever done an Honours or a PhD. Whether the failing is small or catastrophic, remember this happens all the time.

More importantly your supervisor or co-ordinator sees it all the time. The best thing to do is tell your supervisor and your co-ordinator early on. It may be a simple case of steering your research in a slightly new direction, changing the scope of your project, or even taking some extra time. It’s okay to fail, just keep pushing. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : research, science, science writing, scientific writing

The (not-so) funny question of whether scientists should be political leaders

15 08 2019

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At the risk of precociously setting fire to my powder keg, I thought it would be interesting to discuss the very real question of whether there should be more scientists in politics.

The reason I’m contemplating this particular question is because I’ve been forced to. Perhaps contrary to better judgement, I’ve agreed to take part in a the SciFight Science Comedy Debate in Adelaide on 31 August. Organised by scientist-comedian Alanta Colley, the event will pitch two scientist-comedian teams against each other to argue either in the affirmative or negative regarding this — scientists should rule the world.

Of course, the primary goal of the evening is to make people laugh (which still has me wondering whether I was a worthy choice for the role — thank Cthulu there will be some actual, live comedians there too).

But there’s a serious side to this question that I don’t think has any simple answers. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : environmental policy, science, science communication

Nothing like a good forest

31 07 2019

Our history and culture are intimately tied to the planet’s forests and the services they provide to all living beings. In modern times, forests also help combat the impacts of anthropogenic climate change, not only by acting as powerful sinks of the carbon excess resulting from our greenhouse-gas emissions, but also as thermal shields we and many other species can benefit from.

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Understory of the laurel forest in Garajonay National Park (La Gomera, Canary Islands) – also part of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves since 2012. The fog, combined with the cloud belt blowing from the Atlantic Ocean against the mountains (Garajonay is the highest peak at 1500 m), creates a mesic microclimate crucial for plant endemism. Forest canopies reinforce humidity and buffer temperature variation for many species. Photo: Paco Rodríguez.

If we were to choose a house to live, most would likely opt for one with water and electricity supply, noiseless nights, nearby leisure and shopping, and easy communication by public transport. Lacking only one of those aspects could be off-putting.

In truth, those who have the privilege of living in a stable household value it by the full set of available commodities. Similarly, the value of an ecosystem rests on its entire repertoire of ecological functions (1). And this is particularly so for forest ecosystems.

The ecological value of a forest relies on the collection of its native characteristics (2): how many autochthonous and mature trees it can host, how much photosynthesis it fuels, how many pollinisers it feeds, how much soil and water it creates and retains, and many more (3). Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, community ecology, conservation, deforestation, drought, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, endemism, extinction, fragmentation, function, habitat loss, prioritisation, protected area, recovery, reforestation, restoration, synergies

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