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PhD opportunity in control strategies of feral deer

30 09 2021

In collaboration with Biosecurity South Australia, the Global Ecology Lab at Flinders University is happy to announce a wonderful new PhD opportunity in feral deer control strategies for South Australia.

The project is tentatively entitled: Refining models of feral deer abundance and distribution to inform culling programs in South Australia

Feral fallow deer (*Dama dama*) digging in a mallee fowl (*Leipoa ocellata*) mound © Lee Williams

The project brief follows:

South Australian legislation requires that all landholders cull feral deer on their properties. Despite this, feral deer abundance and distribution are increasing across South Australia. This arises because culling by land managers and government organisations is not keeping pace with rates of population growth, and some landholders are harbouring deer for hunting, whereas some deer escape from deer farms.

There are an estimated 40,000 feral deer in South Australia, and state government agencies are working to ramp up programs to cull feral deer before their numbers reach a point where control is no longer feasible.

Planning such large-scale and costly programs requires that government agencies engage economists to measure the economic impacts of feral deer, and to predict the value of these impacts in the future. That modelling is done regularly by governments, and in the case of pest-control programs, the modelling draws on models of feral deer population growth, farmer surveys about the economic, social, and environmental impacts of feral deer, and analyses of culling programs and trials of new culling techniques.

The economic models predict and compare both the current and future costs of:

deer impacts on pastures, crops, native plants, and social values (including illegal hunting)
culling programs that achieve different objectives (e.g., contain vs. reduce vs. eradicate)

The outputs of the models also inform whether there are sufficient public benefits from the investment of public funds into the culling of feral deer.

This PhD project will collate published and unpublished data to refine models of feral deer distribution and abundance under various culling scenarios. This project will drive both high-impact publications and, because this project builds extensive collaborations with government agencies, the results will inform the management of feral deer in South Australia.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Axis axis, Axis porcinus, Cervus elaphus, Cervus unicolor, Chital deer, control, culling, Dama dama, Fallow deer, feral deer, Hog deer, management, Red deer, Rusa deer, Sambar deer
Categories : agriculture, alien species, Australia, conservation, harvest, invasive species, management, mathematics, modelling, South Australia, southern Australia

Biodiversity is everyone’s responsibility

13 07 2018

Workspace: Team Of Diverse Workers Put Hands Together I’m not sure if many South Australians are aware of this, but the Parliamentary Inquiry into Biodiversity by the Environment, Resources and Development Committee presented a report to the 53rd Parliament of South Australia in March 2017. I thought it worthwhile reproducing their executive summary here on CB.com (I’ve highlighted the text that I deem to be rather insightful and simultaneously damning from our own elected government representatives):

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This report summarises the findings and recommendations of the South Australian Parliament’s Environment, Resources and Development Committee’s inquiry into biodiversity in South Australia. Specifically, the inquiry investigated the regulatory and policy framework to determine whether it appropriately supports terrestrial and marine ecological processes, biodiversity values and abates species extinction.

The Committee found that in spite of the efforts of the State and Federal governments, industry and private landholders in South Australia, the condition of biodiversity in the State continues to decline. Species extinctions have occurred in the past and a further “extinction debt” still exists. There is no reason to believe that this trend will improve without a change to the way we approach biodiversity conservation.

A key theme to emerge from the Inquiry is that biodiversity conservation needs to be everyone’s responsibility; State and Federal government, industry, the broader community, and private landholders.

This also means that biodiversity conservation needs to occur across both public and private land, with actions coordinated at a landscape scale.

Making biodiversity conservation everyone’s responsibility requires a range of measures, including legislative reform, improved management of threats and greater involvement of the community. The provision of greater resources would yield faster results.

This report has focused on several key themes that emerged from submissions to the Inquiry.

Regulating for better biodiversity – South Australia’s legislative framework

South Australia’s current legislative framework does not provide for optimum biodiversity outcomes.

Three key issues contribute to this –

an out-of-date suite of environmental legislation that lacks cohesion and consistency, particularly regarding enforcement and compliance provisions;

inadequate and incomplete processes for identifying and protecting at-risk elements that need special measures (e.g. for protection of specific threatened species and ecological communities); and

inadequate consideration of biodiversity conservation in legislation that regulates human activities. In particular, there is a lack of cohesion between the environmental legislative and policy framework and land use planning, assessment and approval.

Statutory fragmentation of biodiversity considerations – that is, consideration of different aspects of biodiversity under different pieces of legislation – results in lack of cohesion and consistency, duplication and inefficiency, and makes it difficult to implement a landscape approach or to identify strategic opportunities and risks.

Taken as a whole, current enforcement provisions do not provide for effective and proportionate compliance action. Enforcement and compliance provisions across the relevant legislation are uneven in their approach. For example, penalties appear to be disproportionate and not risk-based (although there are some exceptions). Modern enforcement tools such as compliance orders, civil remedies and alternative penalties (such as administrative penalties, payment of damages including exemplary damages, remediation orders etc) are not included in all relevant legislation. There is some duplication in offences and inconsistency in the types of sanctions and penalty ranges.

There is an urgent need to amend the legislative framework to support any attempt to improve biodiversity outcomes.

The best approach will be based on clear, shared responsibility for biodiversity outcomes, supported by individual accountability. However, such a change will require policy development and drive.

To ensure forward momentum and improvements in the short term while developing the policy settings to support such a step-change, a staged approach could be implemented. There are various ways this could be achieved.

The Committee suggests a 3-stage approach to reforming the legislative framework. The Committee recommends the creation of a Biodiversity Expert Panel that is responsible for advancing this 3-stage approach.

The first stage will involve amendments to improve operation and effectiveness of the regulatory regime within current policy settings, acknowledging that as a result of Stage 3, provisions may be altered or moved into different pieces of legislation. Amendments generally would be to the existing ‘environmental’ Acts, and primarily to the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972 and Native Vegetation Act 1991. They would include many of the specific areas for amendment identified in EDO submissions (2011 & 2015) as well as in the SA Government submission, for example, beginning with amendments to improve current environmental legislation.

Stage 2 would progress to amendments to improve integration between Acts and improve support for landholders and community participation.

Stage 3 would implement a system whereby all resource use and management would be managed by one piece of legislation, with protection of biodiversity and sustainable development at its core. Provisions for protected area management, and for the scientific work involved in identifying threatened species and communities, may be contained in separate legislation.

Threats, ecological resilience and restoration

The State’s native biodiversity is facing myriad of current threats, including habitat loss and fragmentation (due to development and changing land-use), pest plants and animals, and control burn regimes. There is a need for more stringent vegetation protection, better informed and enacted control and management strategies of known pest plants and animals, and a revision of burning regimes.

Future threats to the State’s biodiversity will be largely driven by climate change impacts and the interaction with existing major threats (e.g. urbanisation and changing land use). Adequately preparing for and managing such future threats will require knowledge of projected changes and pro-active preparation for such changes.

Working with the community

Involvement of the community is an essential part of any biodiversity conservation strategy for the State. It is a foundation stone for moving to a point where biodiversity conservation is everyone’s business.

Community engagement will become increasingly important for biodiversity conservation, especially given the growing role of volunteers to support works on public land as well as the voluntary conservation efforts of private landholders. The expanding role of volunteers reenforces that biodiversity conservation is everyone’s business.

South Australia’s approach to biodiversity conversation on private land needs to be reinvigorated.

Cross cutting themes

There were several cross cutting themes identified in submissions to the Inquiry. There was broad recognition of the strong cultural and historic significance of elements of biodiversity to Aboriginal people, and that this is often poorly understood outside those communities. Continuing to identify ways for Aboriginal people to contribute to land and water management in South Australia remains a priority.

With respect to knowledge generation, critical knowledge gaps exist that need to be filled and existing knowledge is not being adequately understood, communicated or applied. From a resourcing perspective, there is concern that insufficient funds are being allocated to biodiversity conservation, which is affecting work on public and private lands.

The management of over-abundant species in South Australia remains a challenge, noting the recent impacts of long-nose fur seals in the Lower Lakes and Coorong, and ongoing concerns regarding the impact of animals such as little corellas and some species of kangaroos on negative vegetation.

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, climate change, ecological resilience, environmental legislation, management, South Australia, State of the Environment
Categories : anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, cat, climate change, climate shift, conservation, deforestation, development, ecosystem, environmental policy, extinction, extinction debt, fragmentation, function, habitat loss, invasive species, living dead, management, monitoring, Murray-Darling, planning, prioritisation, protected area, recovery, reserve, restoration, South Australia, southern Australia, sustainability, threatened species, water

What Works in Conservation 2018

23 05 2018

Do you have a copy of this book? If not, why not?

This book is free to download. This book contains the evidence for the effectiveness of over 1200 things you might do for conservation. If you don’t have a copy, go and download yourself a free one here, right now, before you even finish reading this article. Seriously. Go. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’ll change your life.

Why you’ll laugh

OK, I may have exaggerated the laughing part. ‘What Works in Conservation 2018’ is a serious and weighty tome, 660 pages of the evidence for 1277 conservation interventions (anything you might do to conserve a species or habitat), assessed by experts and graded into colour-coded categories of effectiveness. This is pretty nerdy stuff, and probably not something you’ll lay down with on the beach or dip into as you enjoy a large glass of scotch (although I don’t know your life, maybe it is).

But that’s not really what it’s meant for. This is intended as a reference book for conservation managers and policymakers, a way to scan through your possible solutions and get a feel for those that are most likely to be effective. Once you have a few ideas in mind, you can follow the links to see the full evidence base for each study at conservationevidence.com, where over 5000 studies have been summarised into digestible paragraphs.

The book takes the form of discrete chapters on taxa, habitats or topics (such as ‘control of freshwater invasives’). Each chapter is split into IUCN threat categories such as ‘Agriculture’ or ‘Energy production and mining’. For each threat there are a series of interventions that could be used to tackle it, and for each of these interventions the evidence has been collated. Experts have then graded the body of the evidence over three rounds of Delphi scoring, looking at the effectiveness, certainty in the evidence (i.e., the quality and quantity of evidence available), and any harms to the target taxa. These scores combine to place each intervention in a category from ‘Beneficial’ to ‘Likely to be ineffective or harmful’. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: conservation, conservation evidence, ecology, intervention, management, managers, policymakers, rehabilitation, restoration, University of Cambridge
Categories : amphibian, biodiversity, birds, captive breeding, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, fish, fragmentation, function, governance, impact, invasive species, management, protected area, research, science, threatened species

Game bird madness

4 11 2015

I just returned to Paris after a brief visit to the University of Aberdeen over the weekend. My hosts, Xavier Lambin and Beth Scott, were not only marvellously welcoming, I also learned a lot about the travesty that is game bird management in the United Kingdom, and especially in Scotland.

As you might already know, the Great Britons are a little cuckoo for birds — I’d even wager that the country produces more twitchers than any other country on Earth. The plus side is that there are few national taxa better censused and studied that British birds, because so many non-scientists get into the spirit of data collection. Hell, I’ve even had a play with some of their datasets.

The other side of this bird madness is not so good — I’m talking about the massive biomass of game birds reared, released and shot every year in the United Kingdom. It’s not the hunting per se with which I take issue, it’s the insane manipulation of an entire ecosystem for the benefit of a few species. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 8 Comments »
Tags: game, game birds, grouse, hunting, management, pheasant, red-legged partridge
Categories : alien species, biodiversity, birds, conservation, decline, economics, harvest, management, predation, predator, tourism

Grim tale of global shark declines

25 06 2015

Please don’t eat me

How do you prevent declines of species you cannot even see? This is (and has always been) the dilemma for fisheries because, well, humans don’t live underwater. Even when we strap on a metal tank full of air and a pair of fins, we’re still more or less like wounded astronauts peering through a narrow window of glass at the huge, largely empty, ocean space. It’s little wonder then that we have a fairly crap system of estimating fish abundance, and an even worse track record of managing them sustainably.

But humans love to eat fish – the total world estimate of legal fisheries landings is something in the vicinity of 190 million tonnes in 2013, up from 18 million tonnes in 1950 (according to FAO). We’re probably familiar with some of the losers of that massive harvest, with species like tunas, bill fishes and orange roughy making the news for catastrophic declines in abundance over the last 30-40 years. And we’re not even talking about the estimated tragedy that is illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

Back in 1999, the FAO started to report that sharks – the new-ish target of many world fisheries resulting from the commercial extinction of many other fin fish fisheries – we’re starting to take the hit. Once generally ignored by fishing industries, sharks soon became popular target species. Then in 2003, Julia Baum and colleagues famously (and somewhat controversially) sounded the alarm for sharks in the Gulf of Mexico by some claims of major and catastrophic declines of large, predatory sharks. While some of the subsequent to-ing and fro-ing in the literature challenged these claims, Baum’s excellent work was ultimately vindicated.

Since then, more and more evidence that sharks are in trouble has surfaced, including the assessment of the reported (again, only legal) catch indicated heavy depletion of coastal sharks even by 1975, and the estimate that 25% of all shark and ray species have an elevated extinction risk, mainly resulting from overfishing. Now even the direct fisheries landings statistics are confirming this grim tale. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: chondrichthyans, declines, extinction, FAO, fisheries, fishing, management, rays, sharks
Categories : coasts, fish, fisheries, marine, ocean

National commitment to conservation brings biodiversity benefits

16 06 2015

What makes some conservation endeavours successful where so many fail to protect biodiversity? Or, how long is a piece of string?

Yes, it’s a difficult question because it’s not just about the biology – such as resilience and area relationships – in fact, it’s probably more about the socio-economic setting that will ultimately dictate how the biodiversity in any particular area fares in response to disturbance.

In the case of protected areas (that I’ll just refer to as ‘reserves’ for the remainder of this post), there’s been a lot of work done about the things that make them ‘work’ (or not) in terms of biodiversity preservation. Yes, we can measure investment, how much the community supports and is involved with the reserve, how much emphasis is put on enforcement, the types of management done within (and outside) of the reserves, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things can (and have to some extent) been correlated with indices of the fate of the biodiversity within reserves, such as rates and patterns of deforestation, the amount of illegal hunting, and the survival probability of particular taxa.

But the problem with these indices is that there are just indices – they probably do not encapsulate the overall ‘health’ of the biodiversity within a reserve (be that trends in the overall abundance of organisms, the resilience of the community as a whole to future disturbances, or the combined phylogenetic diversity of the ecosystem). This is because there are few long-term monitoring programmes of sufficient taxonomic and temporal breadth to summarise these components of complex ecosystems (i.e., ecology is complex). It’s no real surprise, and even though we should put a lot more emphasis on targeted, efficient, long-term biodiversity monitoring inside and outside of all major biodiversity reserves, the cold, hard truth of it is that we’ll never manage to get the required systems in place. Humanity just doesn’t value it enough. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: Bill Laurance, biodiversity, deforestation, forests, Ian Craigie, logging, management, national parks, Protected Areas, reserves, wealth
Categories : conservation, conservation biology, environmental Kuznets curve, fire, poaching, roads

50/500 or 100/1000 debate not about time frame

26 06 2014

As you might recall, Dick Frankham, Barry Brook and I recently wrote a review in Biological Conservation challenging the status quo regarding the famous 50/500 ‘rule’ in conservation management (effective population size [N_e] = 50 to avoid inbreeding depression in the short-term, and N_e = 500 to retain the ability to evolve in perpetuity). Well, it inevitably led to some comments arising in the same journal, but we were only permitted by Biological Conservation to respond to one of them. In our opinion, the other comment was just as problematic, and only further muddied the waters, so it too required a response. In a first for me, we have therefore decided to publish our response on the arXiv pre-print server as well as here on ConservationBytes.com.

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50/500 or 100/1000 debate is not about the time frame – Reply to Rosenfeld

cite as: Frankham, R, Bradshaw CJA, Brook BW. 2014. 50/500 or 100/1000 debate is not about the time frame – Reply to Rosenfeld. arXiv: 1406.6424 [q-bio.PE] 25 June 2014.

The Letter from Rosenfeld (2014) in response to Jamieson and Allendorf (2012) and Frankham et al. (2014) and related papers is misleading in places and requires clarification and correction, as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: 50/500 rule, conservation target, evolutionary potential, Genetics, inbreeding, management, minimum viable population size, MVP, population genetics, recovery
Categories : biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, decline, ecological triage, extinction, extinction debt, extinction vortex, genetic diversity, genetics, management, minimum viable population, MPA, population viability analysis, PVA, recovery, restoration, synergies, threatened species

We’re sorry, but 50/500 is still too few

28 01 2014

Some of you who are familiar with my colleagues’ and my work will know that we have been investigating the minimum viable population size concept for years (see references at the end of this post). Little did I know when I started this line of scientific inquiry that it would end up creating more than a few adversaries.

It might be a philosophical perspective that people adopt when refusing to believe that there is any such thing as a ‘minimum’ number of individuals in a population required to guarantee a high (i.e., almost assured) probability of persistence. I’m not sure. For whatever reason though, there have been some fierce opponents to the concept, or any application of it.

Yet a sizeable chunk of quantitative conservation ecology develops – in various forms – population viability analyses to estimate the probability that a population (or entire species) will go extinct. When the probability is unacceptably high, then various management approaches can be employed (and modelled) to improve the population’s fate. The flip side of such an analysis is, of course, seeing at what population size the probability of extinction becomes negligible.

‘Negligible’ is a subjective term in itself, just like the word ‘very‘ can mean different things to different people. This is why we looked into standardising the criteria for ‘negligible’ for minimum viable population sizes, almost exactly what the near universally accepted IUCN Red List attempts to do with its various (categorical) extinction risk categories.

But most reasonable people are likely to agree that < 1 % chance of going extinct over many generations (40, in the case of our suggestion) is an acceptable target. I’d feel pretty safe personally if my own family’s probability of surviving was > 99 % over the next 40 generations.

Some people, however, baulk at the notion of making generalisations in ecology (funny – I was always under the impression that was exactly what we were supposed to be doing as scientists – finding how things worked in most situations, such that the mechanisms become clearer and clearer – call me a dreamer).

So when we were attacked in several high-profile journals, it came as something of a surprise. The latest lashing came in the form of a Trends in Ecology and Evolution article. We wrote a (necessarily short) response to that article, identifying its inaccuracies and contradictions, but we were unable to expand completely on the inadequacies of that article. However, I’m happy to say that now we have, and we have expanded our commentary on that paper into a broader review. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 14 Comments »
Tags: 50/500 rule, conservation, extinction, Genetics, inbreeding, inbreeding depression, management, minimum viable population size, mvl, population viability analysis, PVA
Categories : conservation, conservation biology, demography, DNA, ecological triage, extinction, genetic diversity, genetics, inbreeding depression, management, modelling, population dynamics, population viability analysis, PVA, threatened species

Making the scientific workshop work

28 10 2013

I don’t mean this

I’ve been a little delayed in blogging this month, but for a very good reason – I’ve just experienced one of the best workshops of my career. I’d like to share a little of that perfect science recipe with you now.

I’ve said it before, but it can stand being repeated: done right, workshops can be some of the most efficient structures for doing big science.

First, let me define ‘workshop’ for those of you who might have only a vague notion of what it entails. To me, a workshop is a small group of like-minded scientists – all of whom possess different skills and specialities – who are brought together to achieve one goal. That goal is writing the superlative manuscript for publication.

So I don’t mean just a bog-standard chin-wag infected with motherhoods and diatribes. Workshops are not mini-conferences; neither are they soap boxes. It is my personal view that nothing can waste a scientist’s precious time more than an ill-planned and aimless workshop.

But with a little planning and some key ingredients that I’ll list shortly, you can turn a moderately good idea into something that can potentially shake the foundations of an entire discipline. So what are these secret ingredients? Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: management, publication, science, science writing, Time, Workshop
Categories : conference, conservation, research, science, scientific publishing, scientific writing

Advice for getting your dream job in conservation science

4 12 2012

A few weeks ago I heard from an early-career researcher in the U.S. who had some intelligent things to say about getting jobs in conservation science based on a recent Conservation Biology paper she co-wrote. Of course, for all the PhDs universities are pumping out into the workforce, there will never be enough positions in academia for them all. Thus, many find their way into non-academic positions. But – does a PhD in science prepare you well enough for the non-academic world? Apparently not.

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Many post-graduate students don’t start looking at job advertisements until we are actually ready to apply for a job. How often do we gleam the list of required skills and say, “If only I had done something to acquire project management skills or fundraising skills, then I could apply for this position…”? Many of us start post-graduate degrees assuming that our disciplinary training for that higher degree will prepare us appropriately for the job market. In conservation science, however, many non-disciplinary skills (i.e., beyond those needed to be a good scientist) are required to compete successfully for non-academic positions. What are these skills?

Our recent paper in Conservation Biology (Graduate student’s guide to necessary skills for nonacademic conservation careers) sifted through U.S. job advertisements and quantified how often different skills are required across three job sectors: nonprofit, government and private. Our analysis revealed that several non-disciplinary skills are particularly critical for job applicants in conservation science. The top five non-disciplinary skills were project management, interpersonal, written communication, program leadership and networking. Approximately 75% of the average job advertisement focused on disciplinary training and these five skills. In addition, the importance of certain skills differed across the different job sectors.

Below, we outline the paper’s major findings with regard to the top five skills, differences among sectors, and advice for how to achieve appropriate training while still in university. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 11 Comments »
Tags: Communication, conservation biology, Doctor of Philosophy, employment, management, PhD, Project management, Students, writing
Categories : conservation, conservation biology, education, environmental economics, environmental policy, environmental science, governance

Protected areas work, but only when you put in the effort

15 11 2012

Apologies for the delay in getting this latest post out. If you read my last one, you’ll know that I’ve been in the United Kingdom for the last week. I’m writing this entry in the train down from York to Heathrow, from which I’ll shortly begin the gruelling 30-hour trip home to Adelaide.

Eight days on the other side of the planet is a bit of a cyclonic trip, but I can honestly say that it was entirely worth it. My first port of call was London where I attended the Zoological Society of London’s Protected Areas Symposium, which is the main topic on which I’ll elaborate shortly.

But I also visited my friend and colleague, Dr. Kate Parr at the University of Liverpool, where I also had the pleasure of talking with Rob Marrs and Mike Begon. Liverpool was also where I first observed the habits of a peculiar, yet extremely common species – the greater flabby, orange-skinned, mini-skirted, black-eyed scouser. Fascinating.

I then had the privilege and serendipitous indulgence of visiting the beautiful and quaint city of York where I gave another talk to the Environment Department at the University of York. My host, Dr. Kate Arnold was simply lovely, and I got to speak with a host of other very clever people including Callum Roberts, Phil Platts, Andy Marshall and Murray Rudd. Between the chats and real ales, mushy peas, pork pies and visits to the Minster, I was in north English heaven.

Enough of the cultural compliments – the title of this post was the take-home message of the ZSL symposium. There I gave a 25-minute talk summarising our recent paper on the performance of tropical protected areas around the globe, and added a few extra analyses in the process. One interesting result that was missing from the original paper was the country-level characteristics that explain variation in protected area ‘health’ (as we defined it in the Nature paper). After looking at a number of potential drives, including per-capita wealth, governance quality, environmental performance, human population density and the proportion of high conservation-value protected areas (IUCN Ia, Ib, II and IV categories), it came out that at least at that coarse country scale that only the proportion of high conservation-value protected areas explained any additional variation in health. In other words, the more category Ia, Ib, II and IV protected areas a country has (relative to the total), the better their protected areas do on average (and remember, we’re talking largely about developing and tropical nations here). Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, commitment, conservation, governance, Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park, management, national parks, Protected Areas, Zoological Society of London
Categories : biodiversity, conference, conservation, decline, deforestation, environmental policy, extinction, governance, habitat loss, harvest, logging, management, planning, protected area, tropical

Linking disease, demography and climate

1 08 2010

Last week I mentioned that a group of us from Australia were travelling to Chicago to work with Bob Lacy, Phil Miller, JP Pollak and Resit Akcakaya to make some pretty exciting developments in next-generation conservation ecology and management software. Also attending were Barry Brook, our postdocs: Damien Fordham, Thomas Prowse and Mike Watts, our colleague (and former postdoc) Clive McMahon, and a student of Phil’s, Michelle Verant. At the closing of the week-long workshop, I thought I’d share my thoughts on how it all went.

In a word, it was ‘productive’. It’s not often that you can spend 1 week locked in a tiny room with 10 other geeks and produce so many good and state-of-the-art models, but we certainly achieved more than we had anticipated.

Let me explain in brief why it’s so exciting. First, I must say that even the semi-quantitative among you should be ready for the appearance of ‘Meta-Model Manager (MMM)’ in the coming months. This clever piece of software was devised by JP, Bob and Phil to make disparate models ‘talk’ to each other during a population projection run. We had dabbled with MMM a little last year, but its value really came to light this week.

We used MMM to combine several different models that individually fail to capture the full behaviour of a population. Most of you will be familiar with the individual-based population viability (PVA) software Vortex that allows relatively easy PVA model building and is particular useful for predicting extinction risk of small populations. What you most likely don’t know exists is what Phil, Bob and JP call Outbreak – an epidemiological modelling software based on the classic susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered framework. Outbreak is also an individual-based model that can talk directly to Vortex, but only through MMM. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, climate change, extinction, management, meta-model manager, modelling, Outbreak, RAMAS, Vortex
Categories : Allee effect, buffalo, cattle, connectivity, conservation, demography, extinction, harvest, management, metapopulation, modelling, population viability analysis, PVA, software

Put the bite back into biodiversity conservation

2 07 2010

Today’s guest post is by Dr. Euan Ritchie, formerly of James Cook University, but who is now firmly entrenched at Deakin University in Victoria as a new Lecturer in ecology. Euan’s exciting research over the course of his memorable PhD (under the tutelage of renowned ecologist-guru, Professor Chris Johnson) has produced some whoppingly high-impact research. This latest instalment highlights a series of related papers he and his colleagues have just produced. We’re fortunate he agreed to give us his thoughts. Interestingly, the topic was just highlighted in the last issue of Nature: Don’t damage dingos.

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Corey has invited me to report on a recent paper published in Ecology Letters and another related study in PloS One, which together show how a better understanding of dingoes and their social structure and associated behaviour can help us to maintain or improve the health of our terrestrial ecosystems. This work, led by PhD student Arian Wallach (University of Adelaide), and involving collaborations with John Read (University of Adelaide), Adam O’Neill (C&A Environmental Services) and Christopher Johnson and me (James Cook University), offers some of the strongest evidence yet of the key roles top predators play in maintaining the balance.

Invasive species, along with habitat loss and the impacts of climate change, are among the greatest threats to the continued survival of many species. Because of this, millions of dollars and time is spent each year to control their populations. The impacts of invasive species in Australia are sadly all too obvious, with nearly half of the world’s mammal extinctions in the last 200 years occurring in Australia, with the prime suspects being the introduced domestic cat and red fox. However, despite massive, costly and ongoing attempts to control fox and cat populations successfully, we continue to witness the decline of many of our native species. Why? We would argue that the problem is that for too long much of our conservation and management efforts have been focused on treating symptoms and not the cause, which is the loss of ecosystem resilience (the natural ability of ecosystems to withstand change).

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, Chris Johson, conservation, dingo, Euan Ritchie, management, mesopredator
Categories : Australia, conservation, dingo, harvest, invasive species, kangaroo, livestock, mammal, management, recovery, The University of Adelaide

Out of touch, impractical and irrelevant

8 07 2009

argument The opening quote to this interesting little article says it all:

“We have all heard policy-makers in environment organisations accuse researchers as out of touch, impractical and irrelevant. We have all seen environment management agencies criticised by researchers in the media, in this journal, at conferences or in the tea room for ignoring, under-utilising or misrepresenting research findings when formulating or implementing policy.”

From the ‘researcher’ side, I can attest that I have on more than one occasion cursed the inability of policy makers (from high-level politicians down to municipal councillors) to implement sound, evidence-based advice on how to prevent (or at least minimise) environmental disasters (for a local example, see this post). I’m sure many policy makers think that (at least some) researchers are pie-in-the-sky, political naïfs that consistently fail to make their research relevant. I know that both extremes are unfortunate realities.

So when I saw Gibbons and colleagues’ paper Some practical suggestions for improving engagement between researchers and policy-makers in natural resource management, I was quite impressed with their excellent suggestions for bridging the gap.

It’s a short paper, but it recommends the following basic steps for improvement:

Understand what motivates people on each side of the policy fence. For researchers, we are locked into a system that rewards success based on a some typically non-economic metrics, such as the quality and quantity of peer-reviewed articles we write, our academic reputation amongst our peers, the amount of external funding we can attract (generally linked to the publication criterion) and the number of students we supervise to research independence. Policy makers working within a more top-down environment are compelled to advance policies that reflect their government’s philosophy (which is dictated by their constituents), and often the deadlines are fierce.
Build relationships. This goes without saying, but often doesn’t happen. Lack of trust can usually only be broken down if you respect and know your counterpart. Gibbons and company suggest that relationships can be built better through the regular dissemination of information back and forth, effective communication (clarity and brevity), and maintaining relationships after information exchange (keep in touch).
Organise regular forums. These meetings are essential to build new and productive relationships. Ways to increase contact include: maintaining ‘who’s who’ lists, encouraging secondments (people exchanges), and organising annual science-policy colloquia.
Explore alternate communication media. Face-to-face meetings are often difficult, so Gibbons et al. recommend that researchers attempt to disseminate their work regularly in other media, such as newsletters, broad-scope journals, journalistic magazines and blogs (this last suggestion is my own!). Governments can also make calls for research proposals in particular, policy-relevant areas, thus forcing alignment prior to research even getting off the ground.

Thanks for the advice.

CJA Bradshaw