More things stay the same, more we retrogress

20 07 2016

obrazek_1idiommmmsmmWithin six months of Abbott and the Coalition seizing power in the 2013 Australian election, decades—if not centuries—of environmental damage and retrograde policies unfolded. But this was no run-of-the-mill incompetence and neglect by government—this was an all-out attack on anything with the merest whiff of environmental protection. The travesty is well-documented, from infamously axing both the carbon-pricing scheme and climate commission, eradicating Labor’s 80% emissions-reduction target by 2050, diluting the Renewable Energy Target, refusing to commit to enforcing the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act (fortunately, this is now law), defunding the only independent legal entity available to limit environmentally destructive development (Environmental Defenders Office), to even attempting to remove the rights of environmental groups to challenge development proposals (thankfully, that failed).

The Coalition’s backward and ineffectual climate change-mitigation policies alone are evidence enough for long-term damage, but their war on the environment in general means that even the future election of a more environmentally responsible government will not undo the damage quickly, if at all. As a result of these and other nearsighted policies, Australia remains one of the highest per-capita greenhouse-gas emitters on the planet, has one of the highest per-capita water uses of any nation, leads the world in mammal extinctions, continues to deforest its already forest-poor landscape, and is a society utterly unprepared to deal with the future challenges of a degraded planet.
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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, climate shift, conservation, corruption, deforestation, ecology, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, fragmentation, governance, mammal, management, poverty, protected area, research, science, threatened species, water

Seeing the wood for the trees

11 07 2016
The Forest Synopsis: Photo of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve, India, by Claire Wordley

The Forest Synopsis: Photo of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve, India, by Claire Wordley

From the towering kapoks of South America to the sprawling banyans of South Asia, from misty cloud forests to ice-covered pines, forests are some of the most diverse and important ecosystems on Earth. However, as conservationists and foresters try to manage, conserve and restore forests across the world, they often rely on scanty and scattered information to inform their decisions, or indeed, no information at all. This could all change.

This week sees the launch of the Forest Synopsis from Conservation Evidence, a free resource collating global scientific evidence on a wide range of conservation-related actions. These aim to include all interventions that conservationists and foresters are likely to use, such as changing fire regimes, legally protecting forests or encouraging seed-dispersing birds into degraded forests.

Making conservation work

“We hear a lot about how important it is to do evidence-based conservation”, says Professor Bill Sutherland at the University of Cambridge, UK, “but in reality getting a handle on what works is not easy. That’s why we set up Conservation Evidence, to break down the barriers between conservationists and the scientific evidence that they need to do their jobs.” Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, deforestation, ecology, environmental policy, environmental science, habitat loss, logging, management, reforestation, research

George Hubert Wilkins — Australia’s first whitefella conservationist?

6 07 2016

As many of you know, I have held the ‘Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change’ at the University of Adelaide since January 2015. My colleague and friend, Barry Brook, was the foundation Chair-holder from 2006-2014.

Initially set up by Government of South Australia to “… advise government, industry, and the community on how to tackle climate change …”, it now is only a titular position based at the University. While I certainly try to live up to the aims of the Chair, it’s even more difficult to live up to the namesake himself — Sir George Hubert Wilkins.

Given I’ve held the position now for over a year and half, I’ve had plenty of time to read about this legendary South Australian (I do choose my words carefully here). Despite most Australians having never heard of the man, it is my opinion that he should be as well known in this country as other whitefella explorers such as Douglas Mawson, Matthew Flinders, Robert Burke, William Wills, and Charles Sturt.

Sadly, he is not well-known, for a litany of possible reasons ranging from spending so much time out of Australia, never having a formal qualification in many of the skills in which he excelled (e.g., geography, meteorology, aviation, engineering, cinematography, biology, etc.), disrespect from other contemporary Australian explorers, and some rather bizarre behaviour later in his career. The list of this man’s achievements is staggering, as was his ability to thumb his nose at death (who, I might add, tried her hardest to escort him off this mortal coil many times well before a heart attack claimed him at the age of 70).

Many books have been written about Wilkins, but as I slowly make my way through some of the better-written tomes, one unsung aspect of his career has struck a deep chord within me — it turns out that Wilkins was also a extremely concerned biodiversity conservationist. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, conservation, deforestation, extinction, habitat loss

Subconsciously sexist?

29 06 2016

2000px-Igualtat_de_sexes.svgIt was with some consternation that I processed some recent second-hand scuttlebutt about my publishing history with respect to gender balance. I’ve always considered myself non-sexist when it comes to working with my colleagues, but as a white, middle-aged male, I’m willing to admit that perhaps subconsciously I’ve been promoting gender inequalities in science without realising that I’m doing it. As a father of a daughter, I also want to make sure the world in which she grows up isn’t as difficult as it has been for women of previous generations.

It is still an unfortunate fact that the ideal of a 50–50 gender balance in the biological sciences is far from becoming a reality; indeed, women have to be about 2.2-2.5 times more productive than their male counterparts to be as successful in securing financial support to do their work.

In fact, a 1993 study of ecologists attributed the lower (but happily, increasing) productivity and dwindling representation of women with career stage to such institutionalised injustices as: less satisfactory relationships with PhD advisors, difficulty in finding suitable mentors, lack of institutional empowerment, greater family responsibilities, lower salaries, lower job security, and lower evaluation of personal success. A follow-up study in 2012 suggested that the gap was narrowing in many of these components, but it was still far from equal. For a more comprehensive discussion of the complexity of the issues in science (see here), and in ecology in particular, see here.

Others have more recently reported no evidence for a gender effect in paper acceptance rates (Biological Conservation), and no difference in the level of perceived expertise between men and women (in long-term environmental or ecological research at 60 protected areas stratified across forests of the Asia-Pacific, African and American tropics).

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Buying time

27 06 2016

farmOriginally published in the Otago Daily Times by Tom McKinlay

—

If we don’t act soon, the world we leave our children will be in a sorry state indeed, leading Australian scientist Prof Corey Bradshaw tells Tom McKinlay.

Prof Corey Bradshaw’s 9-year-old daughter lives what sounds an idyllic existence. On their small farm outside Adelaide in South Australia, she has her chickens and her dogs and her cats, her goats and her sheep.

She’s an only child, but is not short of attention from adults and reads voraciously.

She has big plans; there are at least 25 careers she likes the look of, that she’ll undertake simultaneously: farmer, wildlife rescuer, self-sufficient bush dweller – feeding herself by shooting arrows at fish – scientist and more.

She is optimistic about the future. As she should be. A 9-year-old girl living in Australia in 2016 should regard the sky as no limit at all.

All this I learn from her father, ecologist Prof Bradshaw, who talks of his daughter with an enthusiasm unbounded.

It is fair to assume she has picked up some of her interest in the natural world from him.

He holds the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Adelaide.

And the ecologist, conservation biologist and systems modeller – with a University of Otago degree – has shared a great deal of his work with his daughter.

“She’s very much a farm kid, but because of who I am she gets to hear a lot about animal and plant systems around the world, and she’s travelled a lot with me and she’s a complete fanatic of David Attenborough,” the professor says.

So far, still so idyllic. But Prof Bradshaw’s work means he is at the forefront of alerting the world to what is not right with it.

Pollution, climate change, habitat loss, extinction.

His daughter has travelled with him to see species that might not be with us by the time she grows up.

“She’s hyper-aware of extinctions, in particular, and how climate change is contributing to that,” Prof Bradshaw says.

“I don’t pull any punches with her.”

In fact, he made her cry when she was 5 explaining climate change. She hasn’t needed to travel to know the pot is on the boil. Fires have forced the family to flee its South Australian property several times, not just at the height of summer.

One of the worst fires in the region struck in May a couple of years back.

“We were on the doorstep of winter and we had one of our worst fires in 20 years.”

So even without a scientist in the family, there are certain unavoidable truths for a child growing up in 21st-century Australia.

Prof Bradshaw is coming to Dunedin next month as part of the New Zealand International Science Festival to talk on climate change, looking at it from his daughter’s perspective. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, climate change, climate shift, conservation, development, environmental policy, extinction, food, habitat loss, health, human overpopulation, New Zealand, poverty, science

What immigration means for Australia’s climate-change policies

12 06 2016

After dipping my foot into the murky waters of human population demography a few years ago, I’m a little surprised that I find myself here again. But this time I’m not examining what the future of the global human population might be and what it could mean for our environment; instead, I’m focussing on Australia’s population future and its implications for our greenhouse-gas emissions trajectories.

Just published in Asia and the Pacific Policy Forum1, my paper with long-time co-author Barry Brook is entitled Implications of Australia’s population policy for future greenhouse gas emissions targets. It deals with the sticky question of just how many people Australia can ‘afford’ to house. By ‘afford’ I mean several things, but most specifically in the context of this paper is by how much we need to reduce our per capita emissions to achieve future reduction targets under various immigration-rate scenarios.

In many ways Australia’s population is typical of other developed nations in that its intrinsic fertility (1.78 children/woman) is below replacement (which is itself ~ 2.1 children/female). Yet Australia’s population grew nearly twice (1.88×) as large from 1971 to 2014. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that most of our population growth is due to net immigration.

In fact, between 2006 and 2014, Australia welcomed a net of 215,000 new people per year (this means that of all the permanent immigrants and emigrants, a ‘net’ of approximately 215,000 stayed each year), which represents about 1% of our total population size (that latter most likely just ticked over 24 million). Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, climate shift, conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, human overpopulation

Species-area & species-accumulation curves not the same

30 05 2016

IBI’ve just read an elegant little study that has identified the main determinants of differences in the slope of species-area curves and species-accumulation curves.

That’s a bit of a mouthful for the uninitiated, so if you don’t know much about species-area theory, let me give you a bit of background for why this is an important new discovery.

Perhaps one of the only ‘laws’ in ecology comes from the observation that as you sample from larger and larger areas of any habitat type, the number of species tends to increase. This of course originates from MacArthur & Wilson’s classic book, The Theory of Island Biography (1967), and while simple in basic concept, it has since developed into a multi-headed Hydra of methods, analysis, theory and jargon.

One of the most controversial aspects of generic species-area relationships is the effect of different sampling regimes, a problem I’ve blogged about before. Whether you are sampling once-contiguous forest of habitat patches in a ‘matrix’ of degraded landscape, a wetland complex, a coral reef, or an archipelago of true oceanic islands, the ‘ideal’ models and the interpretation thereof will likely differ, and in sometimes rather important ways from a predictive and/or applied perspective. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biogeography, conservation, coral reefs, ecology, endemism, extinction, extinction debt, habitat loss, island biogeography, species-area curve

Homage to Hanski

21 05 2016

qaecology's avatarThe Quantitative & Applied Ecology Group

Hanski06A tribute from QAECO

Ecology lost a giant last week. It was with great sadness that we at QAECO heard of Professor Ilkka Hanski’s passing after a long illness. Ilkka’s career profoundly affected us. From metapopulation theory, through expansive empirical research, to conservation planning, Ilkka’s research stood as an exemplar that focused our minds and spurred us on. He delivered not just a framework for understanding the complex world of spatial population dynamics, but set a bench mark of rigour that lifted our own aspirations.

Looking back at Ilkka’s career takes one on a fascinating journey. It begins in the fields of Finland, where Ilkka spent long hours of his youth collecting butterflies, bees and beetles. In his own words, it left a lasting impression (Hanski 1999), searing two key elements of population dynamics onto his mind: the importance of habitat patchiness to species distributions, and the changeability of species…

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Categories : conservation

Australia pisses away the little water it has

9 05 2016

cow_drinking_australia_dryWater, water nowhere, with little left to drink.

—

Australians are superlative natural resource wasters, but living in the driest inhabited continent on the planet, you’d think we’d be precious about our water use.

You’d be wrong.

On the contrary, Australia has a huge water footprint (defined as “the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the people of the nation”). For internal domestic use (i.e., not including agricultural and industrial uses, or water imported directly or within other goods), Australians use about 341000 litres per person per year (data from 1997–2001), which is six times the global average of 57000 litres per person per year (1).

Agricultural production is one of the chief consumers of freshwater around the world. For example, the global average virtual water content of rice (paddy) is 2.29 million litres/tonne produced, and for wheat it is 1.33 litres/tonne. Growing crops for biofuel in particular has a huge water footprint — depending on the crop in question, it takes an average of 1400–20000 litres of water to produce just one litre of biofuel (2). If an agricultural product comes from livestock — say, meat, leather, or wool — the water content is typically much higher because of the feed required to keep the animal alive. For example, it takes about three years to raise beef cattle to slaughtering age, with an average of 200 kg of boneless beef produced per animal. This requires about 1,300 kg of grains, 7200 kg of pasture or hay, and 31000 litres of water for drinking and cleaning. This means that the total amount of water required to produce 1 kg of beef is about 15340 litres (1). For Australia, which has over 20 million or so cattle at any one moment, the water footprint alone should at least be cause for concern the next time you tuck into a steak dinner. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : agriculture, conservation, cuisine, deforestation, ecosystem function, environmental policy, food, habitat loss, livestock, water

One-two carbon punch of defaunation

30 04 2016

1-2 punchI’ve just read a well-planned and lateral-thinking paper in Nature Communications that I think readers of CB.com ought to appreciate. The study is a simulation of a complex ecosystem service that would be nigh impossible to examine experimentally. Being a self-diagnosed fanatic of simulation studies for just such purposes, I took particular delight in the results.

In many ways, the results of the paper by Osuri and colleagues are intuitive, but that should never be a reason to avoid empirical demonstration of a suspected phenomenon because intuition rarely equals fact. The idea itself is straightforward, but takes more than a few logical steps to describe: Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Asia, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, bushmeat, carbon, climate change, climate shift, conservation, decline, deforestation, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, extinction, fragmentation, habitat loss, harvest, logging, modelling

Shadow of ignorance veiling society despite more science communication

19 04 2016

imagesI’ve been thinking about this post for a while, but it wasn’t until having some long, deep chats today with staff and students at Simon Fraser University‘s Department of Biological Sciences (with a particular hat-tip to the lovely Nick Dulvy, Isabelle Côté & John Reynolds) that the full idea began to take shape in my brain. It seems my presentation was a two-way street: I think I taught a few people some things, and they taught me something back. Nice.

There’s no question at all that science communication has never before been so widespread and of such high quality. More and more scientists and science students are now blogging, tweeting and generally engaging the world about their science findings. There is also an increasing number of professional science communication associations out there, and a growing population of professional science communicators. It is possibly the best time in history to be involved in the generation and/or communication of scientific results.

Why then is the public appreciation, acceptance and understanding of science declining? It really doesn’t make much sense if you merely consider that there has never been more good science ‘out there’ in the media — both social and traditional. For the source literature itself, there has never before been as many scientific journals, articles and even scientists writing. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biowealth, climate change, conservation, decline, deforestation, ecological literacy, ecosystem function, Endarkenment, environmental policy, environmental science, governance, human overpopulation, invasive species, management, media, population dynamics, research, science, science communication, scientific publishing

Sensitive numbers

22 03 2016
toondoo.com

A sensitive parameter

You couldn’t really do ecology if you didn’t know how to construct even the most basic mathematical model — even a simple regression is a model (the non-random relationship of some variable to another). The good thing about even these simple models is that it is fairly straightforward to interpret the ‘strength’ of the relationship, in other words, how much variation in one thing can be explained by variation in another. Provided the relationship is real (not random), and provided there is at least some indirect causation implied (i.e., it is not just a spurious coincidence), then there are many simple statistics that quantify this strength — in the case of our simple regression, the coefficient of determination (R2) statistic is a usually a good approximation of this.

In the case of more complex multivariate correlation models, then sometimes the coefficient of determination is insufficient, in which case you might need to rely on statistics such as the proportion of deviance explained, or the marginal and/or conditional variance explained.

When you go beyond this correlative model approach and start constructing more mechanistic models that emulate ecological phenomena from the bottom-up, things get a little more complicated when it comes to quantifying the strength of relationships. Perhaps the most well-known category of such mechanistic models is the humble population viability analysis, abbreviated to PVA§.

Let’s take the simple case of a four-parameter population model we could use to project population size over the next 10 years for an endangered species that we’re introducing to a new habitat. We’ll assume that we have the following information: the size of the founding (introduced) population (n), the juvenile survival rate (Sj, proportion juveniles surviving from birth to the first year), the adult survival rate (Sa, the annual rate of surviving adults to year 1 to maximum longevity), and the fertility rate of mature females (m, number of offspring born per female per reproductive cycle). Each one of these parameters has an associated uncertainty (ε) that combines both measurement error and environmental variation.

If we just took the mean value of each of these three demographic rates (survivals and fertility) and project a founding population of n = 10 individuals for 1o years into the future, we would have a single, deterministic estimate of the average outcome of introducing 10 individuals. As we already know, however, the variability, or stochasticity, is more important than the average outcome, because uncertainty in the parameter values (ε) will mean that a non-negligible number of model iterations will result in the extinction of the introduced population. This is something that most conservationists will obviously want to minimise.

So each time we run an iteration of the model, and generally for each breeding interval (most often 1 year at a time), we choose (based on some random-sampling regime) a different value for each parameter. This will give us a distribution of outcomes after the 10-year projection. Let’s say we did 1000 iterations like this; taking the number of times that the population went extinct over these iterations would provide us with an estimate of the population’s extinction probability over that interval. Of course, we would probably also vary the size of the founding population (say, between 10 and 100), to see at what point the extinction probability became acceptably low for managers (i.e., as close to zero as possible), but not unacceptably high that it would be too laborious or expensive to introduce that many individuals. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : bottom-up ecology, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, demography, extinction, investment, management, mathematics, modelling, mvp, population dynamics, population viability analysis, PVA

Higher biodiversity imparts greater disease resistance

12 03 2016

fungal infection

Is biodiversity good for us? In many ways, this is a stupid question because at some point, losing species that we use directly will obviously impact us negatively — think of food crops, pollination and carbon uptake.

But how much can we afford to lose before we notice anything bad is happening? Is the sort of biodiversity erosion we’re seeing today really such a big deal?

One area of research experiencing a surge in popularity is examining how variation in biodiversity (biowealth1) affects the severity of infectious diseases, and it is particularly controversial with respect to the evidence for a direct effect on human pathogens (e.g., see a recent paper here, a critique of it, and a reply).

Controversy surrounding the biodiversity-disease relationship among non-human species is less intense, but there are still arguments about the main mechanisms involved. The amplification hypothesis asserts that a community with more species has a greater pool of potential hosts for pathogens, so pathogens increase as biodiversity increases. On the contrary, the dilution hypothesis asserts that disease prevalence decreases with increasing host species diversity via several possible mechanisms, such as more host species reducing the chance that a given pathogen will ‘encounter’ a suitable host, and that in highly biodiverse communities, an infected individual is less likely to be surrounded by the same species, so the pathogen cannot easily be transmitted to a new host (the so-called transmission interference hypothesis).

So I’ve joined the ecological bandwagon and teamed up yet again with some very clever Chinese collaborators to test these hypotheses in — if I can be so bold to claim — a rather novel and exciting way.

Our new paper was just published online in Ecology: Warming and fertilization alter the dilution effect of host diversity on disease severity2. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biodiversity, biowealth, climate change, conservation, ecology, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, function

Environmental Arsehats

3 03 2016

arsehatI’m starting a new series on ConservationBytes.com — one that exposes the worst environmental offenders on the planet.

I’ve taken the idea from an independent media organisation based in Australia — Crikey — who has been running the Golden Arsehat of the Year awards since 2008. It’s a hilarious, but simultaneously maddening, way of shaming the worst kinds of people.

So in the spirit of a little good fun and environmental naming-and-shaming, I’d like to put together a good list of candidates for the inaugural Environmental Arsehat of the Year awards.

So I’m keen to receive your nominations, either privately via e-mail, the ConservationBytes.com message service, or even in the comments stream of this post. Once I receive a good list of candidates, I’ll do separate posts on particularly deserving individuals, followed by an online poll where you can vote for your (least) favourite Arsehat.

There are a few nomination rules, however. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : conservation, corruption, environmental policy, exploitation

Disadvantages of marine protected areas

29 02 2016

 

 

 

Stop wasting time

Stop wasting time


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Categories : conservation, conservation biology, marine, marine protected area, MPA, protected area, reserve

Biowealth

24 02 2016

frogWhile I’ve blogged about this before in general terms (here and here), I thought it wise to reproduce the (open-access) chapter of the same name published in late 2013 in the unfortunately rather obscure book The Curious Country produced by the Office of the Chief Scientist of Australia. I think it deserves a little more limelight.

—

As I stepped off the helicopter’s pontoon and into the swamp’s chest-deep, tepid and opaque water, I experienced for the first time what it must feel like to be some other life form’s dinner. As the helicopter flittered away, the last vestiges of that protective blanket of human technological innovation flew away with it.

Two other similarly susceptible, hairless, clawless and fangless Homo sapiens and I were now in the middle of one of the Northern Territory’s largest swamps at the height of the crocodile-nesting season. We were there to collect crocodile eggs for a local crocodile farm that, ironically, has assisted the amazing recovery of the species since its near-extinction in the 1960s. Removing the commercial incentive to hunt wild crocodiles by flooding the international market with scar-free, farmed skins gave the dwindling population a chance to recover.

redwoodConservation scientists like me rejoice at these rare recoveries, while many of our fellow humans ponder why we want to encourage the proliferation of animals that can easily kill and eat us. The problem is, once people put a value on a species, it is usually consigned to one of two states. It either flourishes as do domestic crops, dogs, cats and livestock, or dwindles towards or to extinction. Consider bison, passenger pigeons, crocodiles and caviar sturgeon.

As a conservation scientist, it’s my job not only to document these declines, but to find ways to prevent them. Through careful measurement and experiments, we provide evidence to support smart policy decisions on land and in the sea. We advise on the best way to protect species in reserves, inform hunters and fishers on how to avoid over-harvesting, and demonstrate the ways in which humans benefit from maintaining healthy ecosystems. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : alien species, anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, biosequestration, biowealth, carbon, cattle, caviar, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental economics, environmental policy, extinction, fish, fisheries, food, function, habitat loss, human overpopulation, invasive species, mammal, meso-predator release, predation, predator, research, trophic cascades, water

How to rank journals

18 02 2016

ranking… properly, or at least ‘better’.

In the past I have provided ranked lists of journals in conservation ecology according to their ISI® Impact Factor (see lists for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 & 2013). These lists have proven to be exceedingly popular.

Why are journal metrics and the rankings they imply so in-demand? Despite many people loathing the entire concept of citation-based journal metrics, we scientists, our administrators, granting agencies, award committees and promotion panellists use them with such merciless frequency that our academic fates are intimately bound to the ‘quality’ of the journals in which we publish.

Human beings love to rank themselves and others, the things they make, and the institutions to which they belong, so it’s a natural expectation that scientific journals are ranked as well.

I’m certainly not the first to suggest that journal quality cannot be fully captured by some formulation of the number of citations its papers receive; ‘quality’ is an elusive characteristic that includes inter alia things like speed of publication, fairness of the review process, prevalence of gate-keeping, reputation of the editors, writing style, within-discipline reputation, longevity, cost, specialisation, open-access options and even its ‘look’.

It would be impossible to include all of these aspects into a single ‘quality’ metric, although one could conceivably rank journals according to one or several of those features. ‘Reputation’ is perhaps the most quantitative characteristic when measured as citations, so we academics have chosen the lowest-hanging fruit and built our quality-ranking universe around them, for better or worse.

I was never really satisfied with metrics like black-box Impact Factors, so when I started discovering other ways to express the citation performance of the journals to which I regularly submit papers, I became a little more interested in the field of bibliometrics.

In 2014 I wrote a post about what I thought was a fairer way to judge peer-reviewed journal ‘quality’ than the default option of relying solely on ISI® Impact Factors. I was particularly interested in why the new kid on the block — Google Scholar Metrics — gave at times rather wildly different ranks of the journals in which I was interested.

So I came up with a simple mean ranking method to get some idea of the relative citation-based ‘quality’ of these journals.

It was a bit of a laugh, really, but my long-time collaborator, Barry Brook, suggested that I formalise the approach and include a wider array of citation-based metrics in the mean ranks.

Because Barry’s ideas are usually rather good, I followed his advice and together we constructed a more comprehensive, although still decidedly simple, approach to estimate the relative ranks of journals from any selection one would care to cobble together. In this case, however, we also included a rank-placement resampler to estimate the uncertainty associated with each rank.

I’m pleased to announce that the final version1 is now published in PLoS One2. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : conservation, science writing, scientific publishing

Bad science

10 02 2016

Head in HandsIn addition to the surpassing coolness of reconstructing long-gone ecosystems, my new-found enthusiasm for palaeo-ecology has another advantage — most of the species under investigation are already extinct.

That might not sound like an ‘advantage’, but let’s face it, modern conservation ecology can be bloody depressing, so much so that one sometimes wonders if it’s worth it. It is, of course, but there’s something marvellously relieving about studying extinct systems for the simple reason that there are no political repercussions. No self-serving, plutotheocratic politician can bugger up these systems any more. That’s a refreshing change from the doom and gloom of modern environmental science!

But it’s not all sweetness and light, of course; there are still people involved, and people sometimes make bad decisions in an attempt to modify the facts to suit their creed. The problem is when these people are the actual scientists involved in the generation of the ‘facts’.

As I alluded to a few weeks ago with the publication of our paper in Nature Communications describing the lack of evidence for a climate effect on the continental-scale extinctions of Australia’s megafauna, we have a follow-up paper that has just been published online in Proceedings of the Royal Society B — What caused extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna of Sahul? led by Chris Johnson of the University of Tasmania.

After our paper published earlier this month, this title might seem a bit rhetorical, so I want to highlight some of the reasons why we wrote the review. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : anthropocene, Australia, climate change, climate shift, conservation, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, science, scientific publishing, synergies

It’s not always best to be the big fish

3 02 2016

obrien_fish_2Loosely following the theme of last week’s post, it’s now fairly well established that humans tend to pick on the big species first.

From fewer big trees, declines of big carnivores, elephant & rhino poaching, to fishing down the web, big species tend to cop it hardest when it comes to human-caused ecological disturbance.

While there are a lot of different combinations of traits that make some species more vulnerable to extinction than others (see examples for legumes, amphibians, sharks & teleosts, and mammals), one of the main ones is species size.

Generally speaking, larger species tend to produce fewer offspring and breed later in life than smaller species. This means that despite larger species tending to live longer than their smaller counterparts, their ‘slow’ reproductive output means that they are generally more susceptible to rapid environmental change (mainly via human intervention). In other words, their capacity for self-replacement is often too low to counteract the offtake from direct exploitation or habitat loss.

Despite a reasonable scientific understanding of this extinction-risk principle, the degree to which human disturbance affects species’ distributions is much less well quantified, and this is especially true for marine species.

I’m proud to announce another fascinating paper led by my postdoc, Camille Mellin, that has just come out online in Nature Communications: Humans and seasonal climate variability threaten large-bodied coral reef fish with small ranges.

With the world’s largest combined dataset of coral reef fish surveys for the entire Indo-Pacific (including the coral reef fish biodiversity hotspot — the Coral Triangle), we examined which conditions best described the distribution of fishes over a range of body sizes. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, coral reefs, exploitation, extinction, fish, fisheries, habitat loss, harvest, hotspot, human overpopulation, management, marine protected area, predation, predator

No evidence climate change is to blame for Australian megafauna extinctions

29 01 2016

bw spear throwingLast July I wrote about a Science paper of ours demonstrating that there was a climate-change signal in the overall extinction pattern of megafauna across the Northern Hemisphere between about 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. In that case, it didn’t have anything to do with ice ages (sorry, Blue Sky Studios); rather, it was abrupt warming periods that exacerbated the extinction pulse instigated by human hunting.

Contrary to some appallingly researched media reports, we never claimed that these extinctions arose only from warming, because the evidence is more than clear that humans were the dominant drivers across North America, Europe and northern Asia; we simply demonstrated that warming periods had a role to play too.

A cursory glance at the title of this post without appreciating the complexity of how extinctions happen might lead you to think that we’re all over the shop with the role of climate change. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Instead, we report what the evidence actually says, instead of making up stories to suit our preconceptions.

So it is with great pleasure that I report our new paper just out in Nature Communications, led by my affable French postdoc, Dr Frédérik Saltré: Climate change not to blame for late Quaternary megafauna extinctions in Australia.

Of course, it was a huge collaborative effort by a crack team of ecologists, palaeontologists, geochronologists, paleo-climatologists, archaeologists and geneticists. Only by combining the efforts of this diverse and transdisciplinary team could we have hoped to achieve what we did. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Australia, climate change, conservation, exploitation, extinction, harvest, modelling, science, synergies

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