Applied ecology and conservation research groupI apply ecological theory with good doses of field work to seek solutions to the challenges of conserving biodiversity.
In wildlife research, our ability to track sufficient numbers of individuals by GPS is typically limited by cost.
This video describes how to modify an inexpensive off-the-shelf GPS device for use in the field.
This video accompanies a paper, recently accepted for publication in Wildlife Research.
Eureka! We’re finalists in this year’s awards.
Presented annually by the Australian Museum, the Eureka Prizes reward excellence in the fields of research and innovation, leadership and commercialisation, school science, and science journalism and communication.
I’m about to take a well-earned break with my family and visit my old stomping ground of North Queensland, a biodiversity paradise. It’ll be great to reacquaint myself with all of its wonderful inhabitants and of course, some old friends of the human variety! But before we disappear, I’d like to give a short report on the Australian Mammal Society meeting in Sydney, that I attended these last few days. To find out more about the society itself, please see the AMS website.
To start with, this year’s meeting was one of the best I’ve been to, and its organisers are to be commended. I’ve been to a few over the years! My first was way back in 2002. This year’s meeting also held extra significance for me personally, as I met my wife, Dr Jenny Martin at the Sydney meeting 10 years ago to the day. She was working on possums in Victoria at the time and me kangaroos in northern Australia, but that’s a story for another day…
There was a wonderful diversity of talks this year from a project that aims to record mammal vocalisations, to Scottish Beaver restoration (no sniggering, people) , wildlife surveys in war-ravaged Cambodia and Buddhist Bhutan, and predators of all shapes and sizes, including issuing spotted-tailed quolls with ‘passports’ by using their distinctive dotted markings. Dr Matt Crowther delivered an important talk about dingoes and their morphology. We are still without a proper description of what a dingo really is, until now (Matt and his colleagues’ paper is coming!). Until this issue is resolved the appropriate management of dingoes and ‘wild dogs’ will remain clouded. My PhD student Sarah Maclagan also reminded us of the importance of novel habitats, showing how dependent the endangered southern brown bandicoot is to modification of drain networks it lives in and around in peri-urban Melbourne. Me personally, I stayed away from controversial topics and presented a talk on why the dingo barrier fence fails the triple bottom line test. More on that later too!
It was a wonderful meeting and made all the more pleasing by the fact my table won the legendary limerick award (members of the society will appreciate the ‘honour’ associated with this), with a ditty inspired by the Bhutan camera trapping talk by Assoc. Prof. Vernes:
There was a man named Vernes
Who presented his work with finesse
What Google can do
With pics from the zoo
Vernes, it’s time to confess
Once again the student talks were among the best, and it’s great to see such a wonderful bunch of passionate and capable scientists and communicators for the future. Along these lines though, actual numbers of students at the meeting were down and we’d really like to remedy this, so if you’re keen to be part of a society focused on the ecology, conservation and management of mammals, please sign up. Biodiversity needs YOU!
Talk soon, with tales of North Queensland…
This letter was originally published in Nature on behalf of 21 co-signatories. DOI
Policy and legislative changes by Australia’s state governments are eroding the vital protection of the country’s unique biodiversity.
Reserves are being opened up to ecologically disruptive activities, such as grazing by domestic livestock, logging, mining, recreational hunting and fishing, and commercial development. Protected habitats on private and leasehold land are imperilled too. Queensland and Victoria, for example, are relaxing hard-won laws that limit vegetation clearance on private land, further accelerating the loss of regional biodiversity.
Collectively, these actions increase the pressure on biodiversity conservation in protected areas, many of which are already showing biodiversity loss (for example, the Kakadu National Park in northern Australia). Ecological connectivity is being lost, which will hamper the dispersal of species and their ability to respond to climate-change effects.
Species extinctions are primed to increase. Too many of the country’s unique fauna and flora have been wiped out over the past two centuries (see, for example, C. Johnson Australia’s Mammal Extinctions; Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), including the Christmas Island pipistrelle bat (Pipistrellus murrayi) in 2009.
There could be no worse time to weaken reserve protection and relax laws designed to reduce habitat loss.
One of the main reasons this website exists is to increase outreach, or put more excitingly, to share with everyone the super cool conservation stuff I’m passionate about and fortunate enough to do as part of my job!
I’ve just got back from one of my new favorite places, Victoria’s Big Desert / Wyperfeld region. This region is about as remote as Victoria gets. It’s a large, relatively intact section of Mallee heath that is characterised by seemingly endless white sand and large dune systems.
On first glance, one could be forgiven for thinking this system is ‘simple’. However, its faunal diversity, particularly its reptiles, is quite outstanding, and the diversity of plants is well known. However, my reason for visiting this region recently was not to look at reptiles or admire the floristic diversity, but rather to examine other curious inhabitants of the region. Predators and herbivores, in particular dingoes/wild dogs and foxes, and kangaroos and goats, respectively.
The aim is to examine what areas of the landscape dogs are using and whether this in turn affects the distribution and abundance of kangaroos and goats, as we know occurs elsewhere in Australia. This is important work, as the dog population in this part of Victoria is unlikely to consist of ‘pure’ dingoes, and we know little about what ‘wild dogs’ do. The question is: what ecological function do these dogs perform?
Of course, dogs can also have impacts on livestock, particularly sheep, so we’ll be looking at what dogs are eating too (through various means including scat analysis) and how they use the public- and private-land interface (along a gradient from outside to inside the Big Desert / Wyperfeld park region).
Two honours students (Thomas Healey and Jessica Lawton) will also be starting work in the region very soon. Tom will be examining predator-predator interactions, and Jess, the response of small mammals to the presence of predators and fire. Together these studies will build on previous research in the region. And, as always with this type of work, we’ll be looking for eager volunteers to help us out.
Lastly, a piece of advice, when you travel to the Victorian desert in June, don’t forget your sleeping bag, imagine how cold that would be…!
I’m thrilled to announce that we have reached our $20,000 funding target on Pozible, a little over 48 hours ahead of deadline.
A huge thank you to everyone who supported the project, helped to spread the word, or made a donation — large or small.
We will now be able to begin our project: the first comprehensive camera trapping study of animals in the spectacular and remote Torricelli Mountain range in Papua New Guinea. We will build on the already amazing work of the Tenkile Conservation Alliance (TCA) and strengthen the alliance’s partnership with Deakin University.
This is something tangible we can do to help arrest the extinction crisis. Engendering hope is critical.
It has been wonderful to see science and conservation capturing the public’s imagination. I really hope the crowd funding model continues to increase the connection between the public and the scientific communities.
My first foray in to crowd funding has been exhilarating, humbling and exhausting… all at once!
One more thing: if you haven’t pledged but would like to help out, there is still time. More dollars means more cameras, which means more data. Or, if you would like to help out my Deakin colleagues, there are still 5 exciting projects that need support.
Again, on behalf of myself and the TCA, a huge thank you. We are very, very excited to get cameras out and start discovering just what’s out there!
Recent laws allowing hunting and logging in our parks are misguided. Our reserves protect biological diversity and shouldn’t be used otherwise.
![99-year private leases granted by the Victorian Government open the door to inappropriate development in national parks, such as Wilsons Promontory. Image by Steve Bennett [CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0] via Wikimedia Commons.](https://euanritchie.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/wilsonspromnatpark_wikimediacommons.png)
I added my voice to that of 16 eminent Australian ecologists to draw attention to this extremely important issue.
Read the full article (and comments) at The Guardian website.
I was featured today on the School of Life and Environmental Science’s news page.
I’ve been pretty busy getting the message out there on mainstream and social media lately. The message: extinction affects us all. Because of our impacts, we are losing thousands of species each year, leaving us culturally, economically, emotionally and environmentally the poorer. Society’s biggest challenge — and arguably failure — is the continuing loss of species from Earth.
The article shone a light on some of my recent media presence, from my opinion piece on The Conversation to a tweet that Stephen Fry shared with his six million followers.
Australia boasts over 500 national parks covering 28 million hectares of land, or about 3.6% of Australia. You could be forgiven for thinking we’re doing well in the biodiversity-conservation game.
But did you know that of those more than 500 national parks, only six are managed by the Commonwealth Government?
![Kakadu National Park – our biggest and possibly most important national park – is a global conservation embarrassment. Image by Cgoodwin [CC-BY-3.0] via Wikimedia Commons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kakadu_brumbies.jpg)
As ecologists and conservation scientists, we couldn’t agree more with the intent of this proposal, although we have several recommendations and caveats.
I’ve been busy garnering support and raising awareness for our crowd funding campaign.
Check out the full update on Pozible.
In short:
Please continue to spread the word and thanks again for all your support.
Mongabay.com is one of the world’s most popular environmental science and conservation news sites and publisher of Tropical Conservation Science, a peer-reviewed, open-access academic journal that seeks to provide opportunities for scientists in developing countries to publish their research in their native languages.
Here’s my interview with Jordana Dulaney on the decline of the tenkile, and my new project to conserve the species.
Wow: An endorsement from Stephen Fry!
Please support crucial conservation work helping to save endangered mammals in Papua New Guinea http://t.co/lAh0Kh1zni @EuanRitchie1
— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) June 4, 2013
Help us to reverse the extinction crisis and save some of Papua New Guinea’s most special and irreplaceable animals.
Pledge your support at pozible.com/tenkile
Tony Peacock, CEO of the Cooperative Research Centres Association, was kind enough to give me a voice on ABC Radio today with Alex Sloan.
In this interview we talk about the potential of crowdfunding for Australian research, and the role it may play in my own project: discovering the mountain mammals of the Papua New Guinea mountains.
Tensions between state and federal government are rising over the issue of how to manage national parks.
Today I chatted with Radio National’s Cameron Wilson about state / federal relations when it comes to our natural parks.
Experts are warning Australia’s National Parks are facing a ‘death by a thousand cuts’. As protections against grazing, hunting and logging within the parks relax, we are at risk of finding out first-hand just how fragile these eco-systems are, and why they desperately need protecting.
Professor Bill Laurance and I speak to The Wire’s Graham Backhaus.
![Kakadu National Park. Image: Thomas Schoch [CC-BY-SA-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Yello_Water_Kakadu_National_Park_Australia.jpg)
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 licences. It’s been an extraordinary last few months, with various governments in eastern states proposing new uses for these critically important areas.
Did you miss today’s show on Triple R’s Einstein A Go-Go about extinction, crowd funding and trees kangaroos?
Don’t worry, you can listen to it here.
Funding is getting harder and harder to find right? And, the future doesn’t look great, well, at least in Australia. But, before you get depressed and start contemplating another career there is a way we can find funding to undertake important research. It doesn’t rely on governments or funding bodies, it relies on you, me, anyone! It’s called crowd funding.
Read my guest post on Professor Joern Fischer’s blog: Ideas for Sustainability
Applied ecology and conservation research group