The 2018 Boden Conference: Ecological Surprises and Rapid Collapse of Ecosystems in a Changing World In recent years the world has witnessed the ‘collapse’ of a range of ecosystems including the mass bleaching of coral reefs, the sudden disappearance of giant kelp forests and the withering of subantarctic alpine tundra (to name a few systems […]
A mathematical multi-disciplinary cornucopia It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you like your maths strong and without sugar, then MOBSYM would be your drink of choice*. By strong I mean maths that solves challenging real world problems. And without sugar means we don’t need sweeteners to take it in. It’s maths […]
Celebrating CEED’s Inaugural Twitter conference On 22 May 2018, CEED ran its inaugural Twitter Conference on Environmental Decisions and it was a huge success! With over 200 participants and a potential reach of almost 600,000 people, #CEEDTC2018 trended at number 1 on Twitter in Australia. The conference reached all over the world but our online […]
From little tweets to big cities How many metric tonnes of carbon are emitted in travelling to an international environmental conference (including all those airplane miles as delegates jet in from afar)? Five? Five hundred? How about zero? Well that was the carbon footprint of CEED’s inaugural Twitter Conference (#CEEDTC2018) which we ran on 22 May (and coincided with the […]
CEED researchers are passionate about trying to reduce our environmental impacts. A team of our researchers have recently published a correspondence piece in Nature Ecology & Evolution asking why so few academic conferences seem to have taken actions to reduce their environmental impact. The team consisted of Matthew Holden, Nathalie Butt, Alienor Chauvenet, Michaela Plein, […]
ICCB 2017 through the eyes of newbies In July, we travelled to the colourful city of Cartagena in Colombia to attend the Society for Conservation Biology’s bi-annual International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB) conference. “Insights for sustaining life on Earth” was the theme for this year’s conference, with an emphasis on how to better manage […]
A Spanish-speaking magazine for a Spanish-speaking audience As announced in the July issue of Decision Point, Decision Point en Español is now available. Our Spanish cousin got its official launch at the ICCB 2017 (the International Congress for Conservation Biology) run this year in Cartagena – in Spanish-speaking Colombia. CEED researchers ran a workshop at […]
How it works I’d like to share with you one format of virtual conferencing that is proving both popular and effective – the Twitter conference. Twitter is already a popular platform with many academics and we’ve found online conferences using this platform to be enormously successful. Twitter conferences are an initiative of the World […]
Conference technologies in ecology and conservation While it makes eminent sense, there has been limited uptake of virtual conference technologies in ecology and conservation (with the notable exception of the World Seabird Twitter Conferences – see our article). In other fields, virtual conferencing is more common. The great thing about virtual conferencing is that the […]
Every two years the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions brings its people together in one place to share new ideas, reflect on what’s been happening and plan for the future. In December, CEED’s 2015 conference was held in Canberra at the Australian National University. As always it generated a wealth of ideas, catalysed […]
Pacific Islanders, and the environments they live in, face some of the most pressing conservation challenges on the globe. These include habitat loss (due to logging), land clearance, over-harvesting, overfishing, invasive species, pollution, climate change, rising sea levels and extreme weather events. In an effort to constructively engage with these challenges, the 2014 Conference of the Society for Conservation Biology (Oceania section) was held in Fiji in July this year. The event brought together a wide range of scientists and conservation practitioners working across the whole spectrum of theory and practice.
There is a growing emphasis on integrating resilience thinking into conservation planning and decision-making. Framed from a resilience perspective, conservation interventions aim to manage ecosystems to limit the risk of crossing dangerous thresholds into degraded and less desirable ecosystem states. Conservation interventions from a resilience perspective therefore aim to retain ecosystem functions that are important for sustaining biodiversity (eg, number of species and habitats protected). Despite conceptual advances in the literature, challenges remain in the application of resilience to both conservation science and practice.