Today we announced a HEAP of positions in our Global Ecology Lab for hot-shot, up-and-coming ecologists. If you think you’ve got what it takes, I encourage you to apply. The positions are all financed by the Australian Research Council from grants that Barry Brook, Phill Cassey, Damien Fordham and I have all been awarded in the last few years. We decided to do a bulk advertisement so that we maximise the opportunity for good science talent out there.
We’re looking for bright, mathematically adept people in palaeo-ecology, wildlife population modelling, disease modelling, climate change modelling and species distribution modelling.
The positions are self explanatory, but if you want more information, just follow the links and contacts given below. For my own selfish interests, I provide a little more detail for two of the positions for which I’m directly responsible – but please have a look at the lot.
I’ve had a busy weekend entertaining visiting colleagues and participating in WOMADelaide‘s first-ever ‘The Planet Talks‘. If you haven’t heard of WOMADelaide, you’re truly missing out in one of the best music festivals going (and this is from a decidedly non-festival-going sort). Planet Talks this year was a bit of an experiment after the only partially successful Earth Station festival held last year (it was well-attended, but apparently wasn’t as financially successful as they had hoped). So this year they mixed a bit of science with a bit of music – hence ‘Planet Talks’. Paul Ehrlich was one of the star attractions, and I had the honour of going onstage with him yesterday to discuss a little bit about human population growth and sustainability. It was also great to see Robyn Williams again. All the Talks were packed out – indeed, I was surprised they were so popular, especially in the 39-degree heat. Rob Brookman, WOMADelaide’s founder and principal organiser, told me afterward that they’d definitely be doing it again.
But my post really isn’t about WOMADelaide or The Planet Talks (even though I got the bonus of meeting one of my favourite latin bands, Novalima, creators of one of my favourite songs). It’s instead about a paper I heralded last year that’s finally been accepted.
In early 2012 at the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) symposium in Adelaide, the Australian Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (ACEAS) put on what they called the ‘Grand Challenges’ workshop. I really didn’t get the joke at the time, but apparently the ‘grand challenge’ was locking 30 scientists with completely different backgrounds in a room for two days to see if they could do anything other than argue and bullshit. Well, we rose to that challenge and produced something that I think is rather useful.
The paper is a rather in-depth review of how we, 30 fire, animal, plant, soil, landscape, agricultural and freshwater biologists, believe Australia’s new carbon-influenced economy (i.e., carbon price) will impact the country’s biodiversity. Read the rest of this entry »
Ecological societies around the world (e.g., Ecological Society of Australia, British Ecological Society, Ecological Society of America, Czech Society for Ecology, Société française d’Écologie, etc. – see a fairly comprehensive list of ecological societies around the world here) are certainly worthwhile from an academic standpoint. I’m a member of at least three of them, and over the years I’ve found them to be a great way to meet colleagues to discuss various aspects of our work. The conferences are usually a lot of fun (although I’ve generally found the Ecological Society of America conferences are too huge and unwieldy to be terribly beneficial), the talks are usually pretty good, and the social programmes tend to demonstrate just how human we scientists can be (I’ll let you read into that what you want).
An outsider could easily argue, however, that most ecological societies are archaic bastions of a former time when ecology was more a theoretical endeavour for academic circles, with little of practical use in today’s society. I’d agree that many components of these societies still hold onto elements of this sentiment, but it’s fast becoming clear that ecological societies can play an immensely important role in shaping their countries’ environmental policy. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve written before about how we should all be substantially more concerned about the future than what we as a society appear to be. Climate disruption is society’s enemy number one, especially considering that:
all this unprecedented warming is happening on a template of highly degraded land- and seascapes. Extinction synergies (more extinctions than would otherwise be predicted by the simple sum of the different pressures) mean that climate change exacerbates the extinctions to which we are already committed;
we show no sign of slowing emissions rates, partly because of the world’s ridiculous refusal to embrace the only known energy technology that can safely meet emissions-reduction requirements: nuclear power;
there are 7 billion hungry, greedy humans on planet Earth, and that number is growing;
That’s probably the most succinct way that I know of describing the mess we are in, which is why I tend to be more of a pragmatic pessimist when it comes to the future. I’ve discussed before how this outlook makes getting on with my job even more important – if I can’t reduce the rate of destruction and give my family a slightly better future in spite of this reality, at least I will damn well die trying. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re a rational person driven by evidence rather than hearsay, vested interest or faith, then the above examples probably sound ridiculous. But rest assured, millions of people adhere to these points of view because of the phenomenon mentioned in the first sentence above. With this background then, I introduce a paper that’s almost available online (i.e., we have the DOI, but the online version is yet to appear). Produced by our extremely clever post-doc, Tom Prowse, the paper is entitled: No need for disease: testing extinction hypotheses for the thylacine using multispecies metamodels, and will soon appear in Journal of Animal Ecology.
Of course, I am biased being a co-author, but I think this paper really demonstrates the amazing power of retrospective multi-species systems modelling to provide insight into phenomena that are impossible to test empirically – i.e., questions of prehistoric (and in some cases, even data-poor historic) ecological change. The megafauna die-off controversy is one we’ve covered before here on ConservationBytes.com, and this is a related issue with respect to a charismatic extinction in Australia’s recent history – the loss of the Tasmanian thylacine (‘tiger’, ‘wolf’ or whatever inappropriate eutherian epithet one unfortunately chooses to apply). Read the rest of this entry »
Illegal logging is booming, as criminal organisations tighten their grip on this profitable global industry. Hence, it comes just in the nick of time that Australia, after years of debate, is on the verge of passing an anti-logging bill.
Illegal logging is an international scourge, and increasingly an organised criminal activity. It robs developing nations of vital revenues while promoting corruption and murder. It takes a terrible toll on the environment, promoting deforestation, loss of biodiversity and harmful carbon emissions at alarming rates.
Moreover, the flood of illegal timber makes it much harder for legitimate timber producers. The vast majority of those in Australia and New Zealand have difficulty competing in domestic and international markets. That’s one reason that many major Aussie retail chains and brands, such as Bunnings, Ikea-Australia, Timber Queensland, and Kimberly-Clark, are supporting the anti-illegal logging bill.
Illegal logging denies governments of developing nations revenue worldwide. Bill Laurance.
Illegal logging thrives because it’s lucrative. A new report by Interpol and the United Nations Environment Programme, “Green Carbon, Black Trade”, estimates the economic value of illegal logging and wood processing to range from $30 billion to $100 billion annually. That’s a whopping figure — constituting some 10-30% of the global trade in wood products.
Illegal logging plagues some of the world’s poorest peoples, many of whom live in tropical timber-producing countries. According to a 2011 study by the World Bank, two-thirds of the world’s top tropical timber-producing nations are losing at least half of their timber to illegal loggers. In some developing countries the figure approaches 90%.
Many nations export large quantities of timber or wood products into Australia. These include Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, all of which are suffering heavily from illegal logging. Many Chinese-made wood and paper imports also come from illegal timber. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has been pleading with timber-importing nations like Australia to help it combat illegal logging, which costs the nation billions of dollars annually in lost revenues.
The new Interpol report shows just how devious illegal loggers are becoming. It details more than 30 different ways in which organised criminal gangs stiff governments of revenues and launder their ill-gotten gains.
The variety of tactics used is dizzying. These tactics include falsifying logging permits and using bribery to obtain illegal logging permits, logging outside of timber concessions, hacking government websites to forge transportation permits, and laundering illegal timber by mixing it in with legal timber supplies.
The good news however, is that improving enforcement is slowly making things tougher for illegal loggers.
Accustomed to dealing with criminal enterprises that transcend international borders, Interpol is bringing a new level of sophistication to the war on illegal logging. This is timely because most current efforts to fight illegal logging – such as the European Union’s Forest Law and various timber eco-certification schemes – just aren’t designed to combat organised crime, corruption and money laundering.
The Interpol report urges a multi-pronged approach to fight illegal loggers. A key element of this is anti-logging legislation that makes it harder for timber-consuming nations and their companies to import ill-gotten timber and wood products. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, and now finally I have been given the opportunity to put my ideas ‘down on paper’ (seems like a bit of an old-fashioned expression these days). Now this post might strike some as overly parochial because it concerns the state in which I live, but the concept applies to every jurisdiction that passes laws designed to protect biodiversity. So please look beyond my navel and place the example within your own specific context.
As CB readers will appreciate, I am firmly in support of the application of conservation triage – that is, the intelligent, objective and realistic way of attributing finite resources to minimise extinctions for the greatest number of (‘important’) species. Note that deciding which species are ‘important’ is the only fly in the unguent here, with ‘importance’ being defined inter alia as having a large range (to encompass many other species simultaneously), having an important ecological function or ecosystem service, representing rare genotypes, or being iconic (such that people become interested in investing to offset extinction.
But without getting into the specifics of triage per se, a related issue is how we set environmental policy targets. While it’s a lovely, utopian pipe dream that somehow our consumptive 7-billion-and-growing human population will somehow retract its massive ecological footprint and be able to save all species from extinction, we all know that this is irrevocably fantastical.
So when legislation is passed that is clearly unattainable, why do we accept it as realistic? My case in point is South Australia’s ‘No Species Loss Strategy‘ (you can download the entire 7.3 Mb document here) that aims to
“…lose no more species in South Australia, whether they be on land, in rivers, creeks, lakes and estuaries or in the sea.”
When I first learned of the Strategy, I instantly thought to myself that while the aims are laudable, and many of the actions proposed are good ones, the entire policy is rendered toothless by the small issue of being impossible. Read the rest of this entry »
You might remember that I’ve been in California for several weeks now. The principal reason for my visit was to finish a book that Paul Ehrlich and I started last year. So, without the major distractions of everyday university life, I’ve spent much of my time lately at Stanford University in a little office next to Paul’s trying to finish (I also attended a conference in Portland, Oregon).
Yesterday, we wrote the last few paragraphs. A giant gorilla has now lumbered its way off my back.
So. What is the book about, you might ask? I can’t give away too many details, but I will give a few teasers. The book is called, at least for now, ‘Oz & US’, which is a bit of a play of words. In the book we contrast the environmental histories, current state of affairs, and likely futures of our respective nations. It’s written in a popular style so that non-specialists can learn a little something about how bad the environment has become in our two countries.
At first glance, one might wonder why we chose to contrast the U.S. and Australia – they are quite different beasts, indeed. Their histories are immensely different, from the aboriginal populations, through to European colonisation (timing and drivers), biological (including agricultural) productivities, carrying capacities, population sizes and politics. But these differences belie too many convergences in the environmental states of each nation – we now both have increasingly degraded environments, we have both pushed the boundaries of our carrying capacities, and our environmental politics are in a shambles. In other words, despite having started with completely different conditions, our toll on nature’s life-support systems is now remarkably similar.
And anyone who knows Paul and me will appreciate that the book is completely irreverent. We have taken off the gloves in preparation for a bare-knuckle fight with the plutocrats and theocrats now threatening the lives of our grandchildren. We pull no punches here. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week I had the pleasure of entertaining some old friends and colleagues for a writing workshop in Adelaide (don’t worry – they all came from southern Australia locations, so no massive carbon footprints for overseas travel). I’m happy to report it was a productive (and epicurean) week, but that’s not really the point of today’s post.
One of those participants was long-time colleague, Dr. Rik Buckworth. Rik and I first met in Darwin back in the early 2000s when he was lead fisheries scientist for Northern Territory Fisheries; this collaboration and friendship blossomed into an ARCLinkage Project (with Dr. Mark Meekan of AIMS) on shark fisheries (see some of the scientific outputs from that here, here, here and here). Rik has since moved to CSIRO in Brisbane, but keeps a hand in NT fisheries’ affairs. Incidentally, Rik trained under one of the most well-known fisheries modellers in the world – Carl Walters – when he did his PhD at the University of British Columbia back in the early 1990s.
The Philippine bare-backed fruit bat (Dobsonia chapmani; body size = < 220 mm, < 150 g; IUCN status: ‘Critically Endangered A2cd’) is endemic to lowland rain forests [top habitat image] from Negros and Cebu islands. This species of flying fox had been missing from the 1970s and was declared extinct in 2002 (34). In May 2003, five specimens [one shown in the picture above] were trapped in night nets in the Calatong forest (Negros Island), a ~ 1,000-ha fragment of secondary rain forest and agricultural lands [bottom habitat image] (35). The species is reliant on fruit-bearing vegetation and caves for feeding and roosting, respectively. As with many other Philippine bats, it suffers from habitat degradation and hunting. The family Pteropodidae comprises > 150 species. Despite their Draculian look, they all feed on fruits and nectar, and act as important plant pollinators (36), as well as disease vectors such as Ebola virus (37). Flying foxes are distributed in the tropics and subtropics from the Eastern Mediterranean, through the Arabian Peninsula, Asia, Australia, and many islands of the Indian Ocean. Photos courtesy of Ely L. Alcala.
Jared Diamond(1) coined the expression ‘evil quartet’ for the four main human causes of species extinctions: habitat loss/fragmentation, overkill, introduced species and extinction chains [with climate change and extinction synergies (2), the updated expression would be ‘evil sextet”]. However, one third of ‘extinct’ mammal species has been ‘found’ again. Recent studies reveal that the probability of rediscovery depends on the cause of extinction.
Arriving in a city to search for an old friend, I would first look in the suburb where he lived, the pub where we enjoyed a drink and some music, or the park where we used to play football. But if my friend was an outlaw, or had recently gone through a traumatic experience, my chances of finding him at his favourite spots would shrink.
If, instead of a friend, we are searching for the last survivors of an extinct-declared species, surveys also tend to take place in the habitat in which the species was previously found. Such a strategy rests on the classical hypothesis that, given the spatial distribution of a species, its gradual decline must occur from the periphery to the core of its distribution (‘range collapse’) where, in theory, the habitat should be of better quality and the number of individuals higher (3). In contrast, recent work supports that the trajectory of demise of threatened vertebrates progresses from the core to the periphery (‘range eclipse’) (4), because many perturbations make their way as a progressive wave, e.g, fire, logging or urbanisation.
Diana Fisher (5) supports the ‘range eclipse’ hypothesis for ‘extinct’ mammals which have been rediscovered. She quantifies that 60% of the new records are made from peripheral habitats, mainly when the principal cause of extirpation is habitat loss. Not only that, on average species are rediscovered at altitudes 35 % higher than historical records, and only in 5 % of the cases at the locality where it had been last seen.
I’ve had the good fortune of being involved now in a several endeavours funded by the Australian Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (ACEAS); two of those were workshops targeting specific questions regarding estimating modern extinction rates and examining the effects of genetic bottlenecks on Australian biota. The third was a bit different, to say the least – it was a little along the lines of ‘build it, and they will come‘. In other words, what happens when you bung 40 loosely associated researchers in a room for two days? Does anything of substance result, or does it degenerate into a mere talk-fest. I’m happy to say the former. The details of the ACEAS ‘Grand Workshop‘ are now being finalised in a paper that should be submitted by the end of the month. The ACEAS report is reproduced below.
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The Grand ACEAS Workshop was something of an experiment: what will happen when we bring 30 of Australia’s top scientists working on land management issues into the same room?
The Grand Workshop participants came from academia, research institutions and the government, and had all received ACEAS funding for working groups. David Keith, Ted Lefroy, Jasmyn Lynch, Wayne Meyer and Dick Williams were amongst the attendees of the two-day workshop.
And when this group of people came together wanting to analyse and synthesise ecological data, great things happened.
“We decided to focus on how carbon pricing legislation will affect land use change and how will that spill over into biodiversity persistence”, said Professor Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling at The University of Adelaide, who led the synthesis activity at the Grand ACEAS Workshop.
“Will carbon pricing lead to good outcomes for biodiversity, or negative ones, or will it have no bearing whatsoever?”
The workshop participants broke into five groups to discuss how the carbon tax legislation will change land use when it is introduced in July 2012, and the potential impact on biodiversity.
Some of the questions asked included:
Is it enough simply to allow plants to re-grow to be eligible for carbon credits?
How will an increase in forestry plantations impact biodiversity, water catchments and fire regimes?
Will there be more kangaroo grazing to reduce methane emissions and erosion, replacing hard-hoofed livestock?
Can you receive carbon credits for shooting large feral animals like goats, camels, deer and boars?
The groups found many opportunities for positive biodiversity outcomes with the carbon sequestration activities encouraged by carbon pricing, but there are also many potential ‘bio-perversities’. Read the rest of this entry »
A few months ago I asked Chris Johnson of the University of Tasmania to put together a post on his recent Science paper regarding Australian megafaunal extinctions. It seems that it stirred, yet again, some controversy among those who refuse to accept (mainly archaeologists) that humans could have had anything to do with pre-European extinctions. Indeed, how could humans possibly have anything to do with extinctions?!
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Like Corey, I am mainly interested in current environmental problems. But now and then I wade into the debate over the extinction of Australia’s Pleistocene megafauna [editor’s note: Chris literally wrote the book on Australian mammal extinctions over the last 50,000 years], those huge animals that wandered over the Australian landscape until about 40,000 years ago.
This is an endlessly fascinating topic. The creatures were wonderful and bizarre – it’s great fun doing work that lets you think about marsupial lions, giant kangaroos, geese bigger than emus, echidnas the size of wombats, and the rest. The cause of their extinction is perhaps the biggest mystery, and the most vexed controversy, in the environmental history of Australia. And for reasons that I will explain in a minute, solving this mystery is profoundly important for our understanding of contemporary Australian ecology.
The latest bit of work on this is a paper that a group of us (including Corey’s close colleague, Barry Brook) published in Science. You can see it here (if you don’t have access to Science, email me for a copy). So far, research on this problem has concentrated on dating fossils to find out when megafauna species went extinct. Several recent studies have found evidence for extinction between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, which is about when people first came to Australia. But the conclusion that people caused a mass extinction of megafauna has been strenuously criticised, because so far it is based on only a few species with good collections of dates. The critics argue that other species disappeared before humans arrived, maybe in an extended series of extinctions caused by something else, like a deteriorating climate.
This argument over fossils will be with us for a long time. Because finding and dating fossils is such hard, slow work, the fossil record will inevitably give a seriously incomplete picture of what happened. One way around this problem would be to analyse the fossil record using mathematical approaches that take into account the problem of incomplete sampling. Corey is lead author of a recent paper that introduced a great new set of tools for this, and we are part of a group that is currently assembling a complete database of all recent dates on Australian fossils so that we can analyse them using these tools. Stay tuned for the result. Read the rest of this entry »
This workshop is a little different to my last one, and I’m merely a participant (not the organiser) this time. Our task was to examine the mounting evidence that many Australian species appear to show a rather shallow genetic pool from a (or several) major past bottlenecks.
What’s a ‘bottleneck’? In reference to the form after which it was named, a genetic bottleneck is the genetic diversity aftermath after a population declines to a small size and then later expands. The history of this reduction and subsequent expansion is written in the DNA, because inevitably gene ‘types’ are lost as most individuals shuffle off this mortal coil. In a way, it’s like losing a large population of people who all speak different languages – inevitably, you’d lose entire languages and the recovering population would grow out of a reduced ‘pool’ of languages, resulting in fewer overall surviving languages.
Our workshop focus started, as many scientific endeavours do, rather serendipitously. Several years ago, Jeremy Austin noticed that devils who had died out on the mainland several thousand years ago had a very low genetic diversity, as do modern-day devils surviving in Tasmania. He thought it was odd because they should have had more on the mainland given that was their principal distribution prior to Europeans arriving. He mentioned this in passing to Steve Donnellan one day and Steve announced that he had seem the same pattern in echidnas. Now, echidnas cover most of Australia’s surface, so that was equally odd. Then they decided to look at another widespread species – tiger snakes, emus, etc. – and found in many of them, the same patterns were there. Read the rest of this entry »
I wrote this last night with Euan Ritchie of Deakin University in response to some pretty shoddy journalism that misrepresented my comments (and Euan’s work). Our article appeared first in The Conversation this morning (see original article).
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We feel we have to set the record straight after some of our (Bradshaw’s) comments were taken grossly out of context, or not considered at all (Ritchie’s). A bubbling kerfuffle in the media over the last week compels us to establish some facts about dingoes in Australia, and more importantly, about how we as a nation choose to manage them.
A small article in the News Ltd. Adelaide Advertiser appeared on 11 May in which one of us (Bradshaw) was quoted as advocating the removal of the dingo fence because it was not “cost effective” (sic). Despite nearly 20 minutes on the telephone explaining to the paper the complexities of feral animal management, the role of dingoes in suppressing feral predators, and the “costs” associated with biodiversity enhancement and feral control, there wasn’t a single mention of any of this background or justification.
Another News Ltd. article denouncing Ritchie’s work on the role of predators in Australian ecosystems appeared in The Weekly Times the day before, to which Ritchie responded in full.
So it’s damage control, and mainly because we want to state categorically that our opinion is ours alone, and not that of our respective universities, schools, institutes or even Biosecurity SA (which some have claimed or insinuated, falsely, that we represent). Biosecurity SA is responsible for, inter alia, the dingo fence in South Australia. Although our opinions differ on its role, we are deeply impressed, grateful and supportive of their work in defending us from biological problems. Read the rest of this entry »
Just a quick post this week about something I’ve been contemplating for a while.
What if every Australian pledged to eat a feral animal a week?
Yes, I know that it’s a bit out of the pitch, and I’m sure not everyone would do it. Nor would it be physically possible for one person to eat an entire camel, buffalo or deer in a week – but hopefully you get the picture.
Why propose this? Australia is quite over-run with feral animals. Some quick stats:
Now we have, of course, many other ferals (cats, rats, foxes, mice), but I don’t think too many people would want to eat them. I have personally eaten feral pigs, camels, buffalo, goats, and red, fallow and sambar deer, mostly from my own research trips or from friends who hunt. Read the rest of this entry »
Australia’s > 800,000-km road network would go 60 times around the equator of our planet. Confined to the boundaries of any one country, roads are a conspicuous component of the landscape, and shape the dispersion, survival and reproduction of many plants and animals in urban and remote areas.
Those who drive (or are driven by) will be familiar with the image of a crushed kangaroo on the roadside (a hedgehog in Europe), or the sticky mosaic of insects smashed against the windscreen after a high-speed run. Mortality by collision is one of the many effects that roads can have on the demography of organisms – including humans. Those effects encompass
physical alteration of terrestrial and aquatic habitats,
chemical pollution leakage during road construction and maintenance, and from asphalt compounds during storms,
alteration of animal behaviour (e.g., change in home range, or in patterns of flight or vocalisation),
access to remote areas by hunters, fishermen and gatherers in general, and
intense habitat fragmentation1-3.
However, some species get around those negative impacts by using the roads as pathways to new territories, thereby eluding barriers like seas, mountains, rivers, dense vegetation, or competition for vital resources with other species. Read the rest of this entry »
This is probably a little late in terms of breaking news, but it’s good fodder for a blog post nonetheless.
I’ve done several posts now on the value (and threats) of marine macroalgae (seaweeds) – the last one hinted that a major paper was imminent regarding the fate of one of the world’s most important centres of macroalgae diversity in response to our rapidly changing climate: southern Australia.
Well, that paper has now come out in the eminent journal Current Biology headed by that crazy Aussie-Viking phycologist, Dr. Thomas Wernberg (byline here: Thomas was just awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and deserves many congratulations – not least for which the audacity to wear yellow budgie smugglers in public).
Entitled simply “Seaweed communities in retreat from ocean warming“, the short paper belies a hell of a lot of work examining over 60 years of herbarium records indicating MASSIVE shifts in the macroalgae community southwards on both the east and west coasts of Australia (see some media spots here). What do I mean by ‘massive’? Well, about 300 species on average (52 examined in most detail) shifted about 200 km south on the east coast (where warming has been most pronounced), and about 50 km south on the west coast. Read the rest of this entry »
DENR is custodian of a long-term macropod database derived from the State’s management of the commercial kangaroo harvest industry. The dataset entails aerial survey data for most of the State from 1978 to present, annual population estimates, quotas and harvests for three species: red kangaroo (Macropus rufus), western grey kangaroo (Macropus fuliginosus), and the euro (Macropus robustus erubescens). Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to blog about a paper I’ve just had accepted in the Journal of Plant Ecology that isn’t yet out online. The reason for the early post is that the paper itself won’t appear until 2012 in a special issue of the journal, and I think the information needs to get out there.
First, a little history – In May this year I blogged about a workshop that I attended at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China at the behest of Fangliang He. The workshop (International Symposium for Biodiversity and Theoretical Ecology) was attended by big-wig overseas ecologists and local talent, and was not only informative, but a lot of fun (apart from the slight headache on the way home from a little too much báijiǔthe night before). More importantly, we lǎo wài (老外) were paired with various students to assist with publications in progress, and I’m happy to say that for me, two of those have already produced fruit (one paper in review, another about to be submitted).
But the real reason for this post was the special issue of papers written by the invitees – I haven’t published in the journal before, and understand that it is a Chinese journal that has gone mainstream internationally now. I’m only happy to contribute to lifting its profile.
Given that I’m not a plant ecologist per se (although I’ve dabbled), I decided to write a review-like paper that I’ve been meaning to put together for some time now examining the state of Australia’s forests and the history of her deforestation and forest degradation. The reason I thought this was needed is that there is no single peer-reviewed resource one can turn to for a concise synopsis of the history of our country’s forest destruction. The stats are out there, but they’re buried in books, government reports and local-scale scientific papers. My hope is that my paper will be used as a general reference point for people wishing to get up to speed with Australia’s deforestation history.
The paper is entitled Little left to lose: deforestation and forest degradation in Australia since European colonisation, and it describes the general trends in forest loss and degradation Australia-wide, followed by state- and territory-level assessments. I’ve also included sections on plantations, biodiversity loss from deforestation and fragmentation, the feedback loop between climate change and deforestation, the history of forest protection legislation, and finally, a discussion of the necessary general policy directions needed for the country’s forests.
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