A CEED NERP workshop (Rottnest Island, December 2013) Resilience is a foundational concept of ecology and, more recently, has become central to conceiving how ecosystems might cope—or not—with environmental change. Despite its potential importance to decisions for conservation and environmental management, confusion about how to define and measure resilience has impeded its application to decision […]
Abbot Point is the most northerly deepwater coal port in Australia, and is situated 25 kilometres north of Bowen, Queensland. Its value as a bulk port facility lies in the fact there are very few locations along Queensland’s eastern seaboard where deep water (>15m) is close inshore. The port is planned to be expanded to […]
It’s tough because it’s complex Conservation is not rocket science; it’s far more complex. Rocket flight obeys well-understood laws, is predictable, and varies in only four dimensions. Most rockets reach their targets and, when they don’t, the reasons why they didn’t are likely to be obvious. Most conservation actions, in contrast, cannot be assured of […]
Biodiversity offsetting involves compensating for environmental damage at one location by generating ecologically equivalent gains at another, so that there is ‘no net loss’. Biodiversity offsets are increasingly being used as a regulatory tool to balance the needs of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Unfortunately, such schemes are often prone to failure due to poor […]
Cost-effectiveness is all about how you frame the question Drive out into the rural landscape and you’ll see a variety of plantings of native vegetation. They’ll consist of different species, be of different shapes and sizes, and placed in different parts of the landscape. Indeed, about the only thing they have in common is that […]
Offsetting has become an important part of the government tool box for minimising environmental impacts and EDG researchers have been at the forefront of developing offsetting tools and concepts for the Federal Department of the Environment (see a Guide to the EPBC Act). When this work was being done, the things being primarily focussed on […]
A CEED/NERP workshop (Bungendore, October 2013) Our urban environments present unique challenges for biodiversity conservation. Tradeoffs between competing objectives are complex and vested interests high. Past planning decisions often leave lasting ecological and social legacies. Despite decades of research, key knowledge gaps remain around the processes that drive patterns of biodiversity and how they interact with […]
On being SMART and on target It seems obvious that any organisation’s performance goals should be based on achievable outcomes. But planning experts go further and suggest that, to be meaningful, an organisation’s goals should be tangible and doable. To this end they need to be SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and […]
Citizen scientists flock to Eremaea eBird It is a sad but true fact that several of the NERP-ED and CEED Chief Investigators have a pathological love of birds. One of the associated afflictions of this appears to be a love of data about birds – lists of birds, counts of birds, graphs of counts of […]
The impact of imperfect detection on species distribution modeling All ecologists know that wildlife surveys are almost never perfect. Individuals are often missed and even whole species may remain completely undetected even though they are present. Imperfect detection has important implications for wildlife monitoring and species distribution modelling (SDM) and yet it has largely been overlooked […]