Green Fire Science, along with other colleagues from the University of Queensland recently hosted a global marine planning workshop on Lady Elliot Island in the Great Barrier Reef. The workshop brought together numerous researchers from Queensland, Tasmania, and as far as Canada to work on global problems facing marine biodiversity. We compiled some amazing global data on the pressures humans are exerting on the marine environment, modelled distributions of over 20,000 marine species, the location and size of all marine protected areas in the world, and data from the Reef Life Survey which provides abundance and biomass for thousands of fish and invertebrate species from sites across the wor
This week, Nick and Stephen were successful in attaining funding from the National Environmental Science Program Threatened Species Recovery (TSR) Hub to undertake research aimed at improving the outcome of threatened species conservation in Australia. The TSR Hub is a research collaboration focusing on the recovery of Australian threatened species. Considering Australia’s poor track record of animal and plant extinctions (a record that currently shows little sign of improving), major interventions and actions are required to improve the situation. The TSR Hub is one of the many actions aimed at halting biodiversity loss in Australia. The Hub is funded by the Federal Department of the Enviro
While attending the recent Society for Conservation Biology Oceania conference, I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop entitled “What editors and reviewers are (not) expecting to find in your submission”. Hosted by Green Fire Science lab member Dr Moreno Di Marco, this workshop included a panel discussion staring some of the greats of the conservation publishing world: Professor Mark Burgman - Editor in Chief of Conservation Biology; Professor Hugh Possingham - Founding Editor of Conservation Letters and editorial board member of six other journals; Assoc. Professor Margie Mayfield - Subject Editor of Global Ecology and Biogeography and Proceedings of the Royal Society B; and Ass
Maxwell, S.L., Fuller, R.A., Brooks, T.M. and J.E.M. Watson (2016). Biodiversity: The ravages of guns, nets and bulldozers. Nature, 536: 143 – 145. The threats of old are still the dominant drivers of current species loss, indicates an analysis of IUCN Red List data by Sean Maxwell and colleagues. Read it online here Download it here