You know you’ve made it to the big time in Australia when Behind The News does a story on your research. Practically every kid in Australia watches the show at some point during their school years.
Although this was produced last month, I thought I’d post the entire 4-minute video here for your viewing pleasure.
When you popularise your research story for kids, it really gets the message across well.
Thank you, Natasha and BTN for this opportunity.
Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Flinders University and Andrew Hoskins, CSIRO
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
Shamefully, Australia has one of the highest extinction rates in the world.
And the number one threat to our species is invasive or “alien” plants and animals.
But invasive species don’t just cause extinctions and biodiversity loss – they also create a serious economic burden. Our research, published today, reveals invasive species have cost the Australian economy at least A$390 billion in the last 60 years alone.
Our paper – the most detailed assessment of its type ever published in this country – also reveals feral cats are the worst invasive species in terms of total costs, followed by rabbits and fire ants.
Without urgent action, Australia will continue to lose billions of dollars every year on invasive species.
Huge economic burden
Invasive species are those not native to a particular ecosystem. They are introduced either by accident or on purpose and become pests.
Some costs involve direct damage to agriculture, such as insects or fungi destroying fruit. Other examples include measures to control invasive species like feral cats and cane toads, such as paying field staff and buying fuel, ammunition, traps and poisons.
Our previous research put the global cost of invasive species at A$1.7 trillion. But this is most certainly a gross underestimate because so many data are missing.
Read more:
Attack of the alien invaders: pest plants and animals leave a frightening $1.7 trillion bill
As a wealthy nation, Australia has accumulated more reliable cost data than most other regions. These costs have increased exponentially over time – up to sixfold each decade since the 1970s.
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Have you ever constructed a database and then published the findings, only to realise that after the time elapsed your database is already obsolete?
This is the reality of scientific information today. There are so many of us doing so many things that information accumulates substantially in months, if not weeks. If you’re a geneticist, this probably happens for many datasets on the order of days.
While our general databasing capacity worldwide has improved enormously over the last decade with the transition to fully online and web-capable interactivity, the world of scientific publication still generally lags behind the tech. But there is a better way to communicate dynamic, evolving database results to the public.
Enter the ‘living figure’, which is a simple-enough concept where a published figure remains dynamic as its underlying database is updated.
We have, in fact, just published such a living figure based on our paper earlier this year where we reported the global costs of invasive species.
That paper was published based on version 1 of the InvaCost database, but a mere three months after publication, InvaCost is already at version 4.
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Here is the fifth set of biodiversity cartoons for 2021. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.
It is possible to cultivate corals in the sea like growing a nursery of trees to restore a burned forest. Cultivated corals grow faster than wild corals and can be outplanted to increase the healthy area of damaged reefs. Incorporated in projects of citizen science and ecotourism, this activity promotes environmental awareness about coral reefs, […]
I’ve written before about guidelines for co-authorship that I’ve formulated after years of accrued hit-and-miss experiences. Here, ‘hits’ refer to positive experiences (thankfully, the majority), and the ‘misses’ obviously refer to those times where co-authorship had become a contentious issue. While guidelines can go a long way to reducing the probability of nasty in-fighting occurring, […]
