Andrew Lowe | ConservationBytes.com

World Environment Day and Australian forest regeneration

5 06 2011

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

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

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

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

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Tags: Andrew Lowe, Barry Brook, climate change, environment, International Year of Forests, United Nations, World Environment Day
Categories : conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, reforestation, research, restoration

How fast are we losing species anyway?

28 03 2011

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

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

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

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Tags: ACEAS, Andrew Lowe, Barry Brook, biodiversity, Cagan Sekercioglu, Chris Johnson, ecology, extinction, Extinction event, Fangliang He, Lian Pin Koh, Mark Burgman, Navjot Sodhi, Nigel Stork, Stephen Gregory, Tien Ming Lee, William Laurance
Categories : anthropocene, biogeography, conservation, deforestation, ecology, extinction, extinction debt, fragmentation, habitat loss, island biogeography, logging, modelling, research, species-area curve

Biodiversity begins at home

20 01 2011

A few months ago I was involved in a panel discussion entitled ‘Biodiversity begins at home’ held at the Royal Institution of Australia in Adelaide and sponsored by the Don Dunstan Foundation.

The main thrust of the evening was to have both academic (me & Andy Lowe) and on-the-ground, local conservationists (Sarah Lance, Craig Gillespie and Matt Turner) talk about what people can do to stem the tide of biodiversity loss. The video is now available, so I thought I’d reproduce it here. We talked about a lot of issues (from global to local scale), so if you have a spare hour, you might get something out of this. I did, but it certainly wasn’t long enough to discuss such big issues.

Warning – this was supposed to be more of a discussion and less of a talkfest; unfortunately, many of the panel members seemed to forget this and instead dominated the session. We really needed 4 hours to do this properly (but then, who would have watched the video?).