Animal Evolution in Arid Australia Seminar Friday 3 May

Environment Institute member Professor Steven Cooper will present a seminar on his research ‘A New World Down Under: biodiversity and evolution of subterranean animals from the Australian arid zone’.

About the speaker

Professor Steven Cooper is a Principal Researcher at the South Australian Museum and an affiliate at the University of Adelaide, where he is a member of the Australian Centre for Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity, associated with the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. His research investigates the diversity, evolution and molecular ecology of Australian fauna, with a strong focus on subterranean and groundwater invertebrate fauna from the arid zone of Australia.

Where: G25 Benham Laboratories, The University of Adelaide
When: Friday 3 May 2013
Time: 12pm-1pm
Cost: free

All welcome!

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New Paper – Booming during a bust: Asynchronous population responses of arid zone lizards to climatic variables

A new paper written by Environment Institute members, Dr John Read, Professor Barry Brook and Dr Damien Fordham as well as Kelli-Jo Kovac from the Environment Section, BHP Billiton Olympic Dam, has been made available online and will soon be published in the Journal Acta Oecologica.

The paper titled ‘Booming during a bust: Asynchronous population responses of arid zone lizards to climatic variables’ explores the productivity of arid environments and the reproductive success of vertebrates in these systems. Data from their 15 year study at an Australian arid zone site reveals asynchronous demographic responses to rainfall and other climatic variables among different lizard species.

Read and dowload the paper to find out what the researchers discovered by analysing a 15-year multi-species capture-mark-recapture dataset.

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