Last week the Queensland parliament passed laws relaxing land clearing and opening up national parks to cattle grazing. Victoria has proposed similar clearing changes. It’s no surprise more clearing is…
We have to get smarter about the way we manage Australia’s national parks.
Nic Prins
It’s make or break time for Australia’s national parks. National parks on land and in the ocean are dying a death of a thousand cuts, in the form of bullets, hooks, hotels, logging concessions and grazing…
We have just returned from a month collecting insects in the National Heritage-listed Kimberley region of Western Australia. Together with the Wunambal Gaambera and Dambimangari Aboriginal Corporations…
Western Australia’s State Barrier Fence is designed to keep emus out of farms - but at what cost?
Graeme Chapman.
Every five or ten years Western Australia’s emus undertake mass migrations in search of food. On the way they encounter the 1,170km State Barrier Fence, which seeks to stop dingos, emus and kangaroos entering…
Biodiversity matters, even in your mouth.
Mandy Jouan
The more we look, the more we realise just how important intact ecosystems are for our own well-being - and it really doesn’t matter at which scale we are looking. When Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian…
Tropical mountains have more biodiversity than temperate mountains, and temperature is the key according to research led…
The new study suggests extinction driven by climate instability may be just as important as evolution as a driver of plant biodiversity.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecologyweb
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation and Jan Wisniewski, The Conversation
Ice Ages caused a mass extinction of plants in south-eastern Australia around a million years ago, according to a new study that presents a fresh take on how extinction shapes biodiversity. Scientists…
We’re happy to kill individual creatures in large numbers - what’s stopping us wiping out the biosphere?
Darren Harmon
The environmental crisis has never loomed so large nor been so extensively debated as in the last few years. But at the same time we have never heard less about environmental ethics - the bio-inclusive…
Four major hydroelectric projects are planned for the upper Yangtze River valley.
Steb Fisher
The 2012 China Ecological Footprint Report has highlighted the cost to biodiversity of China’s rapid economic development. Biodiversity in China is under pressure because of loss of habitat. In our study…
There are roughly 5 million species on earth. Most are insects.
Roger Smith
There has been enormous uncertainty amongst the scientific community on just how many species there are on Earth and how rapidly we are losing them through extinction. Given that taxonomists have described…
Australia has some of the world’s most unusual biological specimens. We have plants that look like animals, animals that look like plants, a fish that looks like a frog, a mole that does not dig tunnels…
An early dry season fire in Kakadu National Park – are these fires burning up our mammals?
Clay Trauernicht
Conservationists should take heart that Australia is finally waking up to the biodiversity crisis in Australia’s north. It is an urgent problem: right now, a diverse assortment of our small mammals – bandicoots…
A high level of coral cover doesn’t always mean a high level of species diversity; and diversity is important.
Maria Beger
The health and productivity of coral reefs is rapidly declining. Hard corals are the principal builders of coral reef ecosystems; however they are struggling to survive due to pollution, catchment clearing…
Tim Flannery’s recent Quarterly Essay, After the Future, questions whether Australian national parks will become “marsupial ghost towns” despite the tens of millions of dollars governments spend on them…
Without help, parks like Kakadu could become marsupial ghost towns.
Territory Expeditions
Today we begin a series on Australia’s endangered species and how best to conserve them. The series will run each Thursday, and begins with this excerpt from Tim Flannery’s Quarterly Essay, After the Future…
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University