What happens to the wildlife in patches of native vegetation when the surrounding agricultural landscape is converted from open grazed land to closed pine plantation forest? This is far from being an academic question as this situation is increasingly common as plantations are often established on cultivated or grazed land. Alessio Mortelliti and colleagues conducted […]
New research from Geoff Heard and colleagues demonstrates that the impact of chytridiomycosis (a disease caused by amphibian chytrid fungus) on populations of growling grass frogs (Litoria raniformis, an endangered species) is mediated by wetland microclimate and water chemistry. Prevalence of the disease is considerably lower in warm and saline wetlands. It’s known from previous […]
Resource bottlenecks – periods of severe restriction in resource availability – can be triggered by increased climate variability. This is believed to represent an important mechanism through which climate change will affect biodiversity and yet little is understood about its potential impact. Martine Maron and colleagues recently reviewed the topic. They synthesized the key global […]
The National Marine Science Plan is a consensus document from over 23 marine research organisations, universities and government departments and more than 500 scientists. It provides a set of recommendations for science that will be at the heart of dealing with the challenges of our marine nation. According to the ‘Plan’, Australia’s marine industries will […]
Sugeng Budiharta is passionate about conserving biodiversity and restoring tropical forest, and in particular the forests of Indonesia, his country of origin. That’s why he chose to undertake a PhD at the University of Queensland and work with CEED in trying to understand the trade-offs between different types of forest restoration. It’s often said that […]
A CEED Workshop, University of Queensland, July 2015 How can we be confident that a conservation intervention had a positive impact? This was the central question at a recent workshop at the University of Queensland on causal inference. We’ve all heard the adage that ‘correlation does not imply causation’ – so we wanted to find […]
ECRs to contribute to an international effort to save the planet’s biodiversity Vanessa Adams and Sugeng Budiharta are two early-career conservation scientists based at the University of Queensland working with CEED. Their science will soon be informing international efforts to save biodiversity as they have just been selected as Young Fellows of IPBES. IPBES stands […]
Saving koalas from cars We all have to negotiate roads in our daily lives; we cross roads to get to the shops, our kids cross roads as they walk or ride to school, and most of us have a road outside where we live. Although they are part of everyday life they pose significant risks […]
The multiple challenges of planning for complex migratory networks Migratory species are pretty amazing. Some species travel vast distances in a single migration. An individual bar-tailed godwit, a migratory wading bird, was once tracked as travelling an incredible 11,000 km in a single flight! Arctic terns travel the equivalent of to the Moon and back […]
Aussie inverts desperately in need of a bit of protection When Thomas Huxley – Darwin’s ‘bulldog’ and greatest advocate – searched for an animal on which to base his Introduction to Zoology (1880), he naturally settled on the humble crayfish. In his own words, he wanted to show how “the careful study of one of […]
Coming to terms with amphibian chytrid fungus in Australia’s High Country Frogs are in trouble. A third of all frog species are threatened with extinction. The usual culprits of habitat loss and climate change are at work, but another more insidious threat looms. A devastating disease called chytridiomycosis has been wiping out frogs, often from […]
The implications of imperfect detectability can be particularly severe when we are considering the potential impacts of development on a threatened species.
The work of the Environmental Decision Group is about better conservation outcomes. Sometimes, however, when the talk is all about evaluation, adaptive management, spatial optimisation and project prioritisation, it’s possible to lose to sight of the purpose of the science – protecting, enhancing and restoring nature, ecosystems and species. It’s kind of the reverse of […]