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MPs’ ignorance puts national parks in peril
Led by Bill Laurance, our latest opinion editorial in the Higher Education supplement. Interestingly, it has already spawned a bilious and spittle-flecked response by Queensland’s Acting National Parks...
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Conservation: So easy a child could do it
I don’t like to talk about my family online. Call me paranoid, but there are a lot of crazy people out there who don’t like what scientists like me are saying (bugger the evidence). Yes, like many...
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Cleaning up the rubbish: Australian megafauna extinctions
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how to run the perfect scientific workshop, which most of you thought was a good set of tips (bizarrely, one person was quite upset with the message; I saved him...
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Biodiversity needs more than just unwanted leftovers
The real measure of conservation progress, on land or in the sea, is how much biodiversity we save from threatening processes. — A new paper co-authored by Memorial University’s Dr Rodolphe Devillers...
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Australia’s (latest) war on the environment
Yes, the signs were there, but they weren’t clandestine messages written in the stars or in the chaos of tea-leaf dregs. We saw this one coming, but Australians chose to ignore the warning signs and...
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Innate cruelty and exploitation: does biodiversity stand a chance?
Earlier this year I took my daughter to the South Australian Museum, as I often do on weekends. We usually have lunch at the Art Gallery, and then wander the various levels of the Museum at a pace...
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Psychological toll of being a sustainability scientist
Like many academics, I’m more or less convinced that I am somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum. No, I haven’t been diagnosed and I doubt very much that my slight ‘autistic’ tendencies have...
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When human society breaks down, wildlife suffers
Global human society is a massive, consumptive beast that on average degrades its life-support system. As we’ve recently reported, this will only continue to get worse in the decades to centuries to...
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Earth’s second lung has emphysema
Many consider forests as the ‘lungs’ of the planet – the idea that trees and other plants take up carbon and produce oxygen (the carbon and oxygen cycles). If we are to be fair though, the oceans store...
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Australia’s perfect storm of negligence
If, for the purposes of some sick and twisted thought experiment, you were to design policies that would ensure the long-term failure of a wealthy, developed nation, you wouldn’t have to look farther...
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Outright bans of trophy hunting could do more harm than good
In July 2015 an American dentist shot and killed a male lion called ‘Cecil’ with a hunting bow and arrow, an act that sparked a storm of social media outrage. Cecil was a favourite of tourists visiting...
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Getting your conservation science to the right people
A perennial lament of nearly every conservation scientist — at least at some point (often later in one’s career) — is that the years of blood, sweat and tears spent to obtain those precious results...
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No evidence climate change is to blame for Australian megafauna extinctions
Last July I wrote about a Science paper of ours demonstrating that there was a climate-change signal in the overall extinction pattern of megafauna across the Northern Hemisphere between about 50,000...
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It’s not always best to be the big fish
Loosely following the theme of last week’s post, it’s now fairly well established that humans tend to pick on the big species first. From fewer big trees, declines of big carnivores, elephant &...
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Bad science
In addition to the surpassing coolness of reconstructing long-gone ecosystems, my new-found enthusiasm for palaeo-ecology has another advantage — most of the species under investigation are already...
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Environmental Arsehats
I’m starting a new series on ConservationBytes.com — one that exposes the worst environmental offenders on the planet. I’ve taken the idea from an independent media organisation based in Australia —...
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Rich and stable communities most vulnerable to change
I’ve just read an interesting new study that was sent to me by the lead author, Giovanni Strona. Published the other day in Nature Communications, Strona & Lafferty’s article entitled Environmental...
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Inexorable rise of human population pressures in Africa
I’ve been a bit mad preparing for an upcoming conference, so I haven’t had a lot of time lately to blog about interesting developments in the conservation world. However, it struck me today that my...
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Staggering rhino poaching in the Kruger
I have the immense honour and pleasure of attending the University of Pretoria’s Mammal Research Institute 50th Anniversary Celebration conference currently being held in the Kruger National Park. To...
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Transition from the Anthropocene to the Minicene
I’ve just returned from a life-changing trip to South Africa, not just because it was my first time to the continent, but also because it has redefined my perspective on the megafauna extinctions of...
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