Endangered species: could better tracking methods reduce vulnerability or extinction?

Palau. Image by LuxTonnerre, licensed under Creative Commons.

Guest blogger botanist Craig Costion has written an article on endangered species on Biodiversity Revolution‘s blog which describes a new approach to developing the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) classification for potentially endangered species for which no demographic information is available.

The term ‘endangered species’ refers to species which fall under the IUCN’s Red List, a complete list of all endangered mammals, birds, amphibians, sharks, reef-building corals, cycads and conifers, but only a small percentage of all species of reptiles, fishes, and selected groups of plants and invertebrates have been classified.

Currently the IUCN classifies a species or habitat as ‘vulnerable’ if it has suffered a 30% decline ‘over 3 generations or within 100 years’. The author believes it is important to classify the remaining species to include ‘information on the history of habitat modification and destruction extending over and beyond 100 years’ to obtain a greater understanding of species vulnerability.

The full findings and methods are available in the post entitled Endangered Species by Craig Costion.

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How vulnerable are plant species to climate change?

In a study conducted using the native shrub Needle Bottlebrush, Environment Institute member Prof Andrew Lowe (and others) explore the vulnerability of plant species in the face of climate change in their paper Combining population genetics, species distribution modelling and field assessments to understand a species vulnerability to climate change.

 

The aims of this research were ‘to evaluate ‘the risk posed by climate change on C. teretifolius (Needle Bottlebrush), and identify populations for conservation based on high genetic diversity and predicted persistence of habitat’ by using a number of approaches including field assessments, using data from field assessments, population genetics, species distribution modelling and spatial analysis.

The authors find that ‘temperature and rainfall distribution as a result of contemporary climate change are expected to impose serious challenges on many plant species’, but other factors can have effects on plant populations such as species geographic location and human intervention.

The full findings are in the journal Austral Ecology.

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Social media: how to get your message across

Environment Institute member Professor Barry Brook talks about social media and how he uses it to promote or publicise articles, papers or scientific research.

Social media provides a two-way communication system in which the user is empowered to say what they think, or defend a position against a topic that could be quite controversial such as climate change, genetic modification, or nanotechnology.

Social media can also be used to ‘get your content out there, which is then often picked up by more traditional media forms‘, allowing for greater exposure.

Barry utilises his blog Brave New Climate and Twitter to communicate with his audience.

For more of Barry’s thoughts, watch the video below.

About the Academic

Professor Barry Brook is a leading environmental scientist, holding the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and is also Director of Climate Science at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute.

He has published three books, 250 refereed scientific papers (list here), is an ISI highly cited researcher, and regularly writes popular articles for the media.

He runs a popular climate science and energy options blog at http://bravenewclimate.com. He has written a popular book on sustainable nuclear energy, is an International Award Committee member for the Global Energy Prize, and considers himself a ‘Promethean environmentalist’ (seeking effective techno-fixes to solve entrenched sustainability problems).

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A Brave New Green World: does a price on carbon help protect Australia’s biodiversity?

Phot by: Kris*M (Flickr)

As Australia shifts to cut greenhouse gas emissions is it also possible to enhance our biodiversity? A new peer-reviewed paper by Environment Institute members Corey Bradshaw and Barry Brook (with others) directly addresses this question, showing “biodiversity-related enhancement schemes (including environmental plantings and invasive species reduction) can be compatible with carbon-sequestration initiatives”.

The authors find that most land-management options to reduce or capture greenhouse gas emissions will offer clear advantages for biodiversity. These advantages increase the viability of native biodiversity. However, there are potential negative outcomes. The authors discuss what needs to be considered if biodiversity is to benefit from the new carbon economy.

Issues and opportunities include:

• Carbon plantings will only have real biodiversity value if they comprise appropriate native tree species and provide suitable habitats and resources for valued fauna.
• Plantings risk severely altering local water availability, quality and/or water movement.
• Fire can assist with some positive carbon outcomes such as prescribed burning to reduce the frequency of high-intensity wildfires in northern Australia, However, in southern Australia fire is currently unlikely to help but will become increasingly important for biodiversity conservation as the climate warms.
• Carbon price changes to agriculture can benefit biodiversity. Such changes include reductions in tillage frequency and livestock densities, reductions in fertiliser use, and retention and regeneration of native shrubs.

This is a complex area but “as long as biodiversity persistence is taken into account at the planning and implementation stages”, it is the authors’ opinions that carbon and biodiversity “goals are not mutually exclusive”. To achieve this “careful amalgamation of such carbon-mitigation approaches with other incentive schemes such as biodiversity offsets … will be required.”

The full findings, issues and opportunities are in the complete paper Brave new green world – Consequences of a carbon economy for the conservation of Australian biodiversity.

Highlights

► Australia’s new carbon price will have profound implications for land-use change. ► Major changes will arise from environmental plantings and regrowth & fire management. ► Other changes will affect forestry, agriculture and feral animal control. ► Most anticipated land-use changes should benefit biodiversity. ► Negative biodiversity outcomes could arise if changes focus exclusively on carbon.

To see the slide show of this presentation, visit Corey’s SlideShare page.

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Call for presentations – Lake Eyre Basin Biennial Conference

The 6th Biennial Lake Eyre Basin Conference is to be held from 17-19 September 2013 with the theme Basin Voice: shared understanding and action for a sustainable LEB future and the Ministerial Forum is calling for presentations at the event.

The call is open for oral and poster presentations to address the conference theme and subject areas:

• Naturally variable flow in rivers, floodplains, and waterholes
• Water resources management
• Regional NRM and adaptive management challenges
• Biodiversity values, unique flora and fauna, and threatened species
• Cultural strength and culturally significant sites
• Invasive pests and weeds
• Extractive resource industry impacts and management
• Total grazing pressure
• Tourism impacts and management

Submissions are due by Tuesday 30 April 2013 to Emma Ross.

Further information relating to document preparation and submission is available in the following documents:
LEB 2013 Conference Presentation Submission Form
LEB 2013 Conference Call for Presentations

Information about the Conference can be found on the LEB Conference website.

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TEDx Adelaide Forum 4 May 2013

Environment Institute member Alan Cooper will be speaking at this year’s TEDx Adelaide forum on Saturday 4 May 2013.

TEDx is a ideas forum and this year’s theme is Explore. Some of the brightest minds in the state will be discussing what it means to explore, what we explore and why.

Where: Bonython Hall, 231-232 North Terrace, Adelaide
When: Saturday 4 May 2013
Time: 12pm-6pm
Cost: $65 + booking fee

Speakers

Session 1

Will Tamblyn & Gavin Smith: Open Volumetric: 3D holographic visualisation. Building a robot with a holographic head, before holographic projectors existed.

Kiera Lindsey: Lecturer in Australian History & Australian Studies, University of South Australia: Exploration tropes. How tropes of expectation and approach, discovery and disappointment, mystery and knowing are inherent to the concept of exploration.

Lucas Lovell: Exploring the Gobi Desert. Being forced to explore personal capacity and connect with the natural world in one of the world’s most stimulating environments.

Alan Cooper: Australian Centre for Ancient DNA: Using ancient DNA to track the impacts of human evolution on our bacteria and our health.

Kirsty Stark: Wastelander Panda: Exploring Opportunities Online.

Moira Deslandes: Resignation. Lessons from the inside, exploring the frontier of resignation.

Session 2

Larissa McGowan: Choreographer

Mike Lee: SA Museum: Technological change and alien encounters: Lessons from the fossil record. What will our world be like 100 years from now? What will aliens look like? The history of life on earth, as preserved in the fossil record, provides some disconcerting answers.

Peter Burdon: University of Adelaide, Wild Law. Law perpetuates the ecological crisis and needs to be radically reconfigured to facilitate a viable human presence on the Earth.

Travis TJ Ransom: Parkour

Sarah Agnew: On grace and humanity. The gift of story is an invitation into grace and healing, as we explore the human experience together.

Session 3

Drinks in Mezzanine at Hub Central

 

More information on the speakers can be found on the TEDx Adelaide homepage.

To find out more about the event see the TEDx event page.

To buy tickets visit the TEDx order page.

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Listen to Margie Mayfield talk about her research into plant communities

Listen to the podcast from Margie Mayfield’s seminar on 17 April about plant communities in a changing world.

The Environment Institute’s Global Ecology Laboratory presented Dr Margie Mayfield, Senior Lecturer in Plant Ecology at the University of Queensland on Wednesday 17 April 2013. Her research broadly focuses on how plant and insect communities reassemble, persist and function following human land-use change.

ABSTRACT

Human activities are increasingly driving the development of novel plant communities worldwide. These stable mixes of resident native, range-expanded native and exotic plant species have become more common than most truly “natural” plant communities in many areas. Interestingly, novel communities are often interspersed with much more severally degraded communities (all exotics) and areas that support largely native communities. This begs the question, why do novel communities form in some places but not others? Despite the increasing commonality of novel communities and their potential role in conservation, we have a poor understanding of how these communities differ from those they replace and what drives and prevents their assembly. Identifying drivers of novel community development is increasingly important for many conservation and restoration efforts. In this talk I will discuss the theoretical expectations of how we expect communities to change in response large-scale environmental change and what processes should mediate where and when native-dominated communities should be resilient or susceptible to novel community development. I will then discuss several of the projects coming out of my lab looking at novel community assembly in the York Gum woodlands of SW Western Australia, where my group has been studying the mechanisms of novel community assembly over the last several years. Specifically, I will discuss the role of biotic interactions in mediating community wide responses to land use change and species invasions across environmental gradients.

Download the podcast from this seminar.

 

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New paper: Spatial and temporal predictions of inter-decadal trends in Indian Ocean whale sharks

A new paper involving Environment Institute member Corey Bradshaw has recently been published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

The paper, titled Spatial and temporal predictions of inter-decadal trends in Indian Ocean whale sharks, examines the movement patterns of whale sharks in the Indian Ocean and the effect of climate variations on sightings.

ABSTRACT

Image: Whale Shark, coutesy of KAZ2.0/Flickr

The processes driving temporal distribution and abundance patterns of whale sharks Rhincodon typus remain largely unexplained. We present an analysis of whale shark occurrence in the western Indian Ocean, incorporating both spatial and temporal elements. We tested the hypothesis that the average sighting probability of sharks has not changed over nearly 2 decades, and evaluated whether variance in sightings can be partially explained by climate signals. We used a 17 yr dataset (1991 to 2007, autumn only) of whale shark observations recorded in the logbooks of tuna purse-seiners. We randomly generated pseudo-absences and applied sequential generalized linear mixed-effects models within a multi-model information-theoretic framework, accounting for sampling effort and random annual variation, to evaluate the relative importance of temporal and climatic predictors to sighting probability. After accounting for seasonal patterns in distribution, we found evidence that sighting probability increased slightly in the first half of the sampling interval (1991−2000) and decreased thereafter (2000−2007). The model including a spatial predictor of occurrence, fishing effort, time2 and a random spatial effect explained ~60% of the deviance in sighting probability. After including climatic predictors, we found that sighting probability increased slightly with rising temperature in the central Pacific Ocean and reduced temperatures in the Indian Ocean. The declining phase of the peak, concurrent with recent accounts of declines in population size at near-shore aggregations and with the most pronounced global warming, deserves continued investigation. Teasing apart the legacy effects of past exploitation and those arising from on-going climate changes will be a major challenge for the successful long term management of the species.

Visit Inter-Research Science Centre to find out more.

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World Environment Day Awards – Call for Nominations

Nominations are now open nationally for the United Nations Association of Australia (UNAA) 2013 World Environment Day Awards.

Individuals, organisations, businesses, local councils, schools, journalists and community groups are all invited to nominate.

The awards recognise innovative and outstanding environmental programs and initiatives across Australia.

Nominations close on Monday 22 April for the Prime Minister’s Awards, and on Wednesday 1 May for all other categories.

For the full list of categories and criteria, see the UNAA World Environment Day Awards page.

To enter, visit the UNAA Nominations page.

More information about World Environment Day can be found on the United Nations Environment Program website.

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World Heritage Day 18 April

18 April is World Heritage Day, a day where we celebrate cultural heritage and how we can protect and preserve it for future generations.

This year’s theme is the Heritage of Education which focuses on how education in schools, universities, libraries and academies was practised in a wide range of buildings, and their subsequent place in our cultural heritage.

World Heritage Day began in 1982 when a symposium on 18 April, organised by the International Council for Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), decided an ‘International Day for Monuments and Sites’ should be commemorated. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) approved the notion and henceforth this day was to be known informally as World Heritage Day.

How to celebrate World Heritage Day:

• Visit a significant monument or site
• Attend a conference with local or international experts
• Attend an exhibition
• Hold a awareness raising activity for students or children

To find out more about this year’s theme, visit the ICOMOS Heritage of Education page.

General information on World Heritage Day can be found on the ICOMOS International Day for Monuments and Sites page.

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