Whilst climate change continues to hog the limelight, habitat loss remains the key threat to biodiversity worldwide. And whilst events like the Australian bushfires obviously contribute to habitat loss, its main cause is land clearing, whether for agriculture, cattle grazing, mining and urbanization. No matter how many politicians deny or try to deviate attention from it, scientists have shown time and time again just how threatening habitat loss is to our planet’s biodiversity.
Venturing into academia means that the more answers you learn to challenging scientific questions, the more questions get opened up. Nowhere is this more apparent to me than in community ecology. So here I’ve gone through some of the biggest challenges facing community ecology at the moment.
Biodiversity has become an immensely popular buzzword over the last few decades. Yet the concept of genetic diversity has been less present in everyday ecological conversations. So today I want to go through why genetic diversity is important, how we define it, and why there is often controversy about its application in conservation science.
In case you’ve been living under a rock (in which case, stay there, there’s probably less smoke), you’ll know by now that Australia has experienced wildfires over the last couple of months that dwarf what California and the Amazon went through last year. o how has the nation – and the world – reacted? The spectrum has been vast, making analysing the reaction no easy task. So today I wanted to have a look at Australia’s (and in a sense the world’s) ongoing reaction to the Australian bushfires as per the Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Grief.
The thought of an ecologist may conjure the image of a scientist spending their time out in the field counting birds, looking for moss, studying mushrooms. Yet whilst field ecologists remain an integral part of modern ecology, the reality is that much of the discipline has come to rely on complex models. Yet a lot of these models rely on one big assumption – independence.
2019 was a year in which many changes that our planet is experiencing came to the fore, capped off in December by the Australian bushfires, a phenomenon that scientists predicted would start to occur with increasing intensity at the beginning of last decade. With all the change that our planet is currently undergoing, it’s always worth noting that the discipline of ecology itself has changed as well.
Last Sunday, the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid came to an end. It was a summit that marked the end of a year in which climate change has transformed into a climate emergency and in which society has woken up to the urgency of the situation. For a couple of days, I was in Madrid to participate in the part of the COP25 that was open to the public and to march with thousands of others in the biggest demonstration ever held in Spain.
This week’s paper looks at how great a role Indigenous Peoples could play in helping to preserve the planet’s biodiversity, and mitigate the effects of climate change.
Bridging the gap between researchers, practitioners and policymakers
The Plankton and Policy Research Group at Plymouth University. PI: Dr Abigail McQuatters-Gollop
Research, teaching, and mentorship in the sciences
Science for the Environment
ice age ecology, early career academia, and diversity in STEM
Conservation, management and planning in contested landscapes
Multa novit vulpes
Behavioural ecologist and science communicator at Deakin University
