Management guidelines for many fire-prone ecosystems highlight the importance of maintaining a variable mosaic of fire histories for biodiversity conservation. Managers are encouraged to aim for fire mosaics that include all successional states of vegetation, and also include variation in the underlying ‘invisible mosaic’ of past fire frequencies, severities, and fire-return intervals. But how should […]
Richard Hobbs, Leonie Valentine and colleagues believe we should be paying increased attention to species movement in response to environmental change (Hobbs et al, 2017). In particular we need to consider changes in species distributions and altered biological assemblages. Such changes are well known from paleoecological studies, but have accelerated with ongoing pervasive human influence. […]
CEED researchers from the Universities of Melbourne and Queensland working with the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program have developed a user-friendly model to help managers decide whether an area is free from devil facial tumor disease. Led by Tracy Rout, the researchers modelled the removal of a diseased Tasmanian devil population from Forestier Peninsula (Tasmania), […]
Completing the circle of life in death All of us will die – now imagine how beautiful it would be if our friends could visit our grave, hear the song of a critically endangered bird, and know that in death, we saved this bird from going extinct? I’m talking about a conservation burial in which […]
Modelling the future of Earth’s titans During the 1900s, many whales were commercially harvested almost to extinction. Amongst the most impacted were the larger baleen whales, those species with comb-like baleen plates used to strain the water for food (such as krill and small fish). In 1983 the International Whaling Commission decreed a moratorium on […]
Do community forests reduce deforestation? Community forest management has been identified as a win-win option for reducing rates of deforestation while also improving the welfare of rural communities in developing countries. But is it delivering the hoped for benefits? Despite considerable investment around the world in community forestry, there is a lack of systematic evaluation […]
Making the most of the marine Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas IBA stands for Important Bird and Biodiversity Area. It’s a program run by Birdlife International and has been developed over 30 years. It aims to identify sites significant for their contribution to the persistence of bird species and other biodiversity using these areas. Initially, […]
Why bother? How is it done? KEY MESSAGES: Prioritisation is unavoidable; most environmental programs have too few resources to meet their goals Given the great variation between potential environmental investments, good prioritisation is critically important In most cases, good prioritisation of environmental investments is reasonably easy to apply In some cases, prioritisation is more complex […]
Funding parks, communities and conservation in a developing country KEY MESSAGES: We estimated visitors’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) fee to access Chitwan National Park We found that visitors’ average WTP is substantially higher (>2.5 times) than the current entry fee This evidence led to an immediate policy change by the Nepalese Government resulting in a significant increase […]
Quantifying the cumulative development footprint in the Great Western Woodlands KEY MESSAGES: We digitised anthropogenic disturbances in the Great Western Woodlands to estimate the cumulative development footprint We discovered that the majority of the development footprint in the region consists of roads, tracks, and other linear infrastructure (an estimated 150,000 km exists in the region; […]
Challenge and opportunity as climate change impacts the icy continent KEY MESSAGES: Antarctica is being impacted by climate change, invasive species and an expanding human footprint Ice-free areas, home to nearly all Antarctic terrestrial biodiversity, are projected to dramatically expand by 2100 with potentially severe consequences for native species There is no better time than […]
Tips on incorporating equity into decision-making KEY MESSAGES: Improving social equity is important to good environmental outcomes What constitutes equitable outcomes and processes is highly normative and subject to ethical deliberation We encourage a more analytical incorporation of equity into conservation decision making (and provide a guide on how this might be done) There are […]
Australia does well when it comes to environmental research The QS World University Rankings website sets out which universities around the world are excelling in different areas. Under ‘environmental sciences’ in 2017, Australia’s top university is The University of Queensland coming in at number 9. The University of Melbourne sits at number 18 with the […]
What are the strange lines in this image? The photo is an aerial view of a section of the Great Western Woodland – the largest remaining temperate woodland on the planet (the stippled pattern is actually trees). You’ll find it in south-western WA. The lines are tracks to facilitate minerals exploration. CEED researcher Keren Raiter […]