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Amphibian conservation in a managed world

1 04 2020

Crinia parinsignifera (top) and Limnodynastes tasmaniensis (bottom). Photo: Kate Mason

The amphibian class is diverse, and ranges from worm-like caecilians to tiny frogs that live their entire lives within bromeliads high in the rainforest canopy. Regardless of form or habit, all share the dubious honour of being cited as the world’s most endangered vertebrate taxon, and 41% of the species assessed are threatened with extinction. Rapidly changing climates will further exacerbate this situation as amphibians are expected to be more strongly affected than other vertebrates like birds or mammals.

This peril stems from a physiological dependence on freshwater.

Amphibians breathe (in part) through their skin, so they maintain moist skin surfaces. This sliminess means that most amphibians quickly dry out in dry conditions. Additionally, most amphibian eggs and larvae are fully aquatic. One of the greatest risks to populations are pools that dry too quickly for larval development, which leads to complete reproductive failure.

This need for freshwater all too often places them in direct competition with humans.

To keep pace with population growth, humans have engineered a landscape where the location, and persistence of water is tightly controlled. In seeking water availability for farming and amenity, we all too often remove essential habitats for amphibians and other freshwater fauna.

To protect amphibians from decline and extinction, land managers may need to apply innovative techniques to support vulnerable species. With amphibians’ strong dependence on freshwater, this support can be delivered by intelligently manipulating where and when freshwater appears in the landscape, with an eye to maintaining habitats for breeding, movement and refuge. A range of innovative approaches have been attempted to date, but they are typically developed in isolation and their existence is known only to a cloistered few. A collation of the approaches and their successes (and failures) has not occurred.

In our latest paper, we used a systematic review to classify water-manipulation techniques and to evaluate the support for these approaches. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: amphibian, conservation, conservation evidence, environmental flow, flow, frog, pump, restoration, salamander, spray, spraying, Toad, water, wetlands
Categories : amphibian, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, disease, drought, environmental policy, extinction, fish, frog, habitat loss, management, pollution, predation, predator, recovery, restoration, water

A plant’s adaptive traits don’t follow climate conditions as you might expect

27 03 2020

mountain

Just a quick post today, my last one for March. Like probably most of you, I’ve been trying to pretend to be as normal as possible despite the COVID-19 surrealism all around me. But even COVID-19 has shifted my research to a small degree.

But I’m not going to talk about the global pandemic right now (I can almost hear the collective sigh of relief). Instead, I’m going to go back to topic and discuss a paper that I’ve just co-authored.

Last year I went to China’s Yunnan Province where I met some fantastic colleagues at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden who were doing some very cool stuff with the variation in plant functional traits across environmental gradients.

Well, those colleagues invited me to participate in one those research projects, and I’m happy to say that the result has just been published in Forests.

Measuring the functional traits of different alpine trees species in the Changbai Mountains of far north-eastern China (no, I didn’t get to go there), the research set out to test how these varied among species and elevation.

Of course, one expects that different trees use different combinations of traits to survive the rigours of mountain life (high variation in temperature, freezing, wind, etc.), but generally speaking, you might expect things like xylem vessel diameter and density to change more or less monotonically (i.e., changing in a consistent manner as elevation rises or falls). This is because trees should adapt their traits to the local conditions as best they can. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Changbai Mountains, China, elevational gradient, functional traits, plant traits, plants, species distribution models, trees
Categories : bioclimatic envelope, biodiversity, biogeography, climate change, climate shift, conservation, conservation biology, ecology, function, research

Projecting global deaths from covid19

18 03 2020

covid

I know that it’s not the best way to project expected deaths from a pandemic disease, but being something of a demographer, I just couldn’t help myself.

I therefore took the liberty of punching in some basic probabilities into our world population model to see how many people could potentially die from covid19. But this is not an epidemiological model, so I’m probably vastly over-estimating the total death rates.

Nonetheless, the results were revealing.

I first took the expected mortality by age class based on the Chinese data so far. I then assumed a worst-case scenario of a 60% infection rate (i.e., 3 out of 5 of us will eventually catch the virus). I assumed these values across the entire globe (not taking into account greater or lesser susceptibility or probability of death among countries or regions).

I also considered two more scenarios: (i) double the mortality rate (in each age class), and (ii) the disease outbreak lasting two years instead of just one.

The graph below shows the four different outcomes based on these scenarios relative to the baseline (no covid): Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: corona, corona virus, covid19, deaths, disease, epidemiology, modelling, mortality, population model, predictions, sars-cov2
Categories : conservation, disease, human overpopulation, population dynamics

How I feel now about climate change

10 03 2020

‘Bleak No. 2’ by David Vogler

Five years ago I was asked by a researcher at the Australia National University, Joe Duggan, how I ‘felt’ about climate change.

This was part of an original initiative that put a human face on the scientists working on elements of one of society’s greatest existential threats.

Thus, Is This How You Feel? became a massive success in terms of bringing to the world the idea that scientists are also deeply affected by what they see happening around them.

Five years later, Joe asked me and all the other scientists who participated to provide an update on how we feel.

Here’s what I wrote: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: anger, climate disruption, democracy, depression, desperation, emotions, feelings, Global warming, plutocracy, politics
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, corruption, development, economics, Endarkenment, environmental policy, exploitation, governance, human overpopulation, recovery, science, sustainability

In pursuit of an ecological resilience in the Anthropocene

3 03 2020

An excerpt from Alejandro Frid‘s new book, Changing Tides: An Ecologist’s Journey to Make Peace with the Anthropocene (published first in Sierra, with photos courtesy of New Society Publishers)

—

The birth of my daughter, in 2004, thrust upon me a dual task: to be scientifically realistic about all the difficult changes that are here to stay, while staying humanly optimistic about the better things that we still have.

By the time my daughter turned eleven, I had jettisoned my nostalgia for the Earth I was born into in the mid-196os—a planet that, of course, was an ecological shadow of Earth 100 years before, which in turn was an ecological shadow of an earlier Earth. The pragmatist in me had embraced the Anthropocene, in which humans dominate all biophysical processes, and I ended up feeling genuinely good about some of the possible futures in which my daughter’s generation might grow old.

It was a choice to engage in a tough situation. An acknowledgement of rapid and uninvited change. A reaffirmed commitment to everything I have learned, and continue to learn, as an ecologist working with Indigenous people on marine conservation. Fundamental to this perspective is the notion of resilience: the ability of someone or something—a culture, an ecosystem, an economy, a person—to absorb shocks yet still maintain their essence.

But what is essence? Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Anthropocene, biodiversity, extinction
Categories : anthropocene, biodiversity, birds, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecology, environmental policy, ethics, extinction, fish, habitat loss

Unlikely the biodiversity crisis will improve any time soon

6 02 2020

hopeless Around a fortnight ago I wrote a hastily penned post about the precarious state of biodiversity — it turned out to be one of the most-read posts in ConservationBytes‘ history (nearly 22,000 views in less than two weeks).

Now, let’s examine whether this dreadful history is likely to get any better any time soon.

Even if extinction rates decline substantially over the next century, I argue that we are committed to an intensifying biodiversity extinction crisis. The aggregate footprint from the growing human population notwithstanding, we can expect decades, if not centuries, of continued extinctions from lag effects alone (extinction debts arising from previous environmental damage engendering extinctions in the future)¹.

Global vegetation cover and production are also likely to decline even in the absence of continued habitat clearing — the potential benefit of higher CO₂ concentrations for plant photosynthesis is more than offset by lower availability of water in the soil, heat stress, and the frequency of disturbances such as droughts². Higher frequencies and intensities of disturbance events like catastrophic bushfire will also exacerbate extinction rates³.

However, perhaps the least-appreciated element of potential extinctions arising from climate change is that they are vastly underestimated when only considering a species’ thermal tolerance⁴. In fact, climate disruption-driven extinction rates could be up to ten times higher than currently predicted⁴ when extinction cascades are taken into account⁵. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Aichi Targets, Anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, CBD, conservation, conservation biology, Convention on Biological Diversity, decline, ecological footprint, extinction, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, kelp, SDG, Sustainable Development Goals, threatened species
Categories : anthropocene, climate change, conservation, development, ecosystem, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, extinction debt, living dead

The state of global biodiversity — it’s worse than you probably think

24 01 2020

Chefurka biomass slide

I often find myself in a position explaining to non-professionals just how bad the state of global biodiversity really is. It turns out too that even quite a few ecologists seem to lack an appreciation of the sheer magnitude of damage we’ve done to the planet.

The loss of biodiversity that has occurred over the course of our species’ time on Earth is staggering. This loss is now truly planetary in scale and caused by human actions, albeit the severity of which is unequally distributed across the globe¹. While Sandra Díaz and company recently summarised the the extent of the biodiversity crisis unfolding¹ well in their recent synopsis of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)² report, I’m going to repeat some of the salient summary statements here, and add a few others. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 21 Comments »
Tags: Anthropocene, biodiversity, decline, extinction, Sixth Mass Extinction, threatened species
Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, conservation, conservation biology, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, extinction, fisheries, food, habitat loss, harvest, kelp, threatened species

Influential conservation ecology papers of 2019

24 12 2019

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.

Decline of the North American avifauna — … the first comprehensive assessment of population change in the North American avifauna.

Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change — … [highlights] the crucial role of microbial transformations in determining set points for sea temperature, pH and ocean productivity … [identifies] microbial activity as the “life support system of the biosphere”.

(Note: Lots of people hated this one, basically because it appears to be severely flawed; nonetheless, it received several recommendations on F1000): The global tree restoration potential — … illustrates the substantial potential of capturing some of the excess carbon dioxide present in the earth’s atmosphere by planting trees.

Managing the middle: a shift in conservation priorities based on the global human modification gradient — … probably the best global assessment of spatial extent of human modification of natural terrestrial environments published to date.

Five decades of northern land carbon uptake revealed by the interhemispheric CO₂ gradient — … [concludes] that northern hemisphere [sic] vegetation and soil account for the majority of the terrestrial carbon sink, rather than tropical forests (not trying to display too many sour grapes here, but we’ve already reported this for the boreal forest, and they didn’t even bother to cite us — sad panda)

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: agriculture, biodiversity, birds, carbon, carbon uptake, climate change, climate emergency, CO2, conservation, declines, drought, extinction, Fish, fisheries, forests, insects, marine ecology, microorganisms, pesticides, range edges, trees, urban biodiversity, wilderness
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

One 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?

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: Altmetric, Altmetrics, bibliometrics, citation rate, citations, impact factor, media, science communication, scientometrics, social media, traditional media
Categories : blog, conservation, science communication, scientific publishing

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

10 12 2019

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

—

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.

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.

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 »

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: archaeology, climate change, extinction, megafauna, palaeoecology, palaeontology, Sahul
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.

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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Tags: biodiversity, birds, climate change, mortality, moulting, plumage, survival
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-megafauna Over 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: archaeology, Australia, chronology, climate change, extinction, humans, Late Pleistocene, megafauna, palaeoecology, palaeontology, Pleistocene, Sahul, south-eastern Australia, spatial statistics
Categories : Australia, climate change, climate shift, conservation, ecology, extinction, palaeo-ecology, southern Australia, statistics, top-down ecology

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

13 11 2019

(reproduced from The Conversation)

—

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.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: Anthropocene, extinction, mass extinction, mass extinction event, speciation
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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Tags: biodiversity, civilisation, climate change, collapse, conservation, environment, extinction, hunting, sustainability
Categories : biowealth, cartoon, conservation, environmental policy, extinction

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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Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: Anthropocene, climate change, climate disruption, environment, Flinders University, Paul Ehrlich, politics, public event, public lecture
Categories : anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, celebrity, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, conservation scholars, corruption, decline, deforestation, development, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem services, education, Endarkenment, environmental economics, environmental policy, ethics, exploitation, extinction, extremism, Flinders University, food, governance, habitat loss, health, human overpopulation, impact, investment, media, pollution, poverty, science, science communication, South Australia, sustainability, synergies, threatened species, toxification

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 »

Comments : 9 Comments »
Tags: 1080, 1080 poison, cat, dingo, environment, environmental policy, fox, policy, quoll, Victoria
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, childrenairpollution it’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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Tags: air pollution, breastfeeding, child health, children, corruption, diarrhoea, ecosystem services, environmental degradation, food supply, governance quality, health investment, human overpopulation, infectious disease, injury, Millennium Development Goals, over-population, paediatrics, pulmonary diseae, sanitation, stunting, Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations, water, wealth, World Health Organization
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?

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: Anthropocene, climate change, climate emergency, collapse, extinction, extinction emergency, food supply, human-caused global warming, sustainability, The Great Dying
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

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

9 09 2019

mindslave I 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 »