A feed from Consercation Bytes, a site dedicated to highlighting, discussing and critiquing the science of conservation that has demonstrated measurable, positive effects for global biodiversity.
31 March 2025. Trapped in the light – Night is the peak activity period for many animal species. In the Western Andes of Ecuador, the Chocó golden scarab flies between forest patches during the night, but urban lighting interferes with their paths and jeopardises populations already struggling to persist in fragmented native forests. Urban development has created a network of illuminated infrastructure that […]
27 February 2025. Trump’s asinine war on climate science is pushing us into a dystopian future – Toa55, Shutterstock Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Flinders University US President Donald Trump’s latest war on the climate includes withdrawing support for any research that mentions the word. He has also launched a purge on government websites hosting climate data, in an apparent attempt to make the evidence disappear. Yes, it’s bad, especially for US-based scientists. […]
24 February 2025. Job advert: Research Associate in Environmental Time-Series Modelling – We have just today advertised a new postdoctoral position funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures (CIEHF) that will be based in the Global Ecology Lab at Flinders University. This is a fixed-term position for up to 3 years, and we are especially targeting Indigenous candidates. […]
22 January 2025. iEcology identifies extent of synthetic polymer habitats – The internet has become an informational telescope to study what happens nearly everywhere the planet. Using internet observations, it has been recently documented that terrestrial hermit crabs use plastic waste as shelter along tropical coasts. Before the internet irrupted, I was living in Spain and frequently travelled from my hometown to universities in Valencia and Barcelona to access scientific journals. Back then, these journals were […]
20 January 2025. The (new) birds and the bees – ‘Nuff said
15 January 2025. Add a voice update to your loops in R – If you’re like me, you use a lot of loops in R. I do not profess to be the most efficient coder, but loops make sense to me and I’m generally not concerned about make the fastest simulations. But sometimes my loops take some time to finish, so I often add a rolling text update […]
6 December 2024. Conservation and ecology journal ranks 2023 – Quite a bit late this year, but I’ve finally put together the 2023 conservation / ecology / sustainability journal ranks based on my (published) journal-ranking method (as I’ve done every year since 2008). After 16 years of doing this exercise, I can’t help but notice that most journals don’t do much differently from year to […]
4 December 2024. 5000 piggies, 500 piggies, 100 piggies, … and there there was none – The Black Summer bushfires of 2019–2020 that razed more than half of the landscape on Kangaroo Island in South Australia left an indelible mark on the island’s unique native biodiversity, which is still struggling to recover. However, one big bonus for the environment’s recovery is the likely eradication of feral pigs (Sus scrofa). Invasive feral pigs cause […]
18 September 2024. Small populations of Stone Age people drove dwarf hippos and elephants to extinction on Cyprus – Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Flinders University; Christian Reepmeyer, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut – German Archaeological Institute, and Theodora Moutsiou, University of Cyprus Imagine growing up beside the eastern Mediterranean Sea 14,000 years ago. You’re an accomplished sailor of the small watercraft you and your fellow villagers make, and you live off both the sea and the […]
22 August 2024. Human impact, extinctions, and the biodiversity crisis – Human overpopulation is often depicted in the media in one of two ways: as either a catastrophic disaster or an overly-exaggerated concern. Yet the data understood by scientists and researchers is clear. So what is the actual state of our overshoot, and, despite our growing numbers, are we already seeing the signs that the sixth […]
30 March 2024. Less affluent countries more prone to damage caused by biological invasions despite lower trade volume – Non-native species introduced mainly via increasing trade of goods and services have huge economic, health, and environmental costs. These ‘biological invasions’ involve the intentional or unintentional transport and release of species beyond their native biogeographical ranges, facilitating their potential spread. Over the last few decades, invasive species have incurred an average cost of at least […]
12 March 2024. Indigenous fire management began more than 11,000 years ago: new research – Wildfire burns between 3.94 million and 5.19 million square kilometres of land every year worldwide. If that area were a single country, it would be the seventh largest in the world. In Australia, most fire occurs in the vast tropical savannas of the country’s north. In new research published in Nature Geoscience, we show Indigenous […]
21 February 2024. New ecosystems, unprecedented climates: more Australian species than ever are struggling to survive – Australia is home to about one in 12 of the world’s species of animals, birds, plants and insects – between 600,000 and 700,000 species. More than 80% of Australian plants and mammals and just under 50% of our birds are found nowhere else. But habitat destruction, climate change, and invasive species are wreaking havoc on Earth’s […]
21 December 2023. People once lived in a vast region in north-western Australia – and it had an inland sea – For much of the 65,000 years of Australia’s human history, the now-submerged northwest continental shelf connected the Kimberley and western Arnhem Land. This vast, habitable realm covered nearly 390,000 square kilometres, an area one-and-a-half times larger than New Zealand is today. It was likely a single cultural zone, with similarities in ground stone-axe technology, styles […]
18 December 2023. Rextinct: a new tool to estimate when a species went extinct – If several fossils of an extinct population or species are dated, we can estimate how long ago the extinction event took place. In our new paper, we describe CRIWM, a new method to estimate extinction time using times series of fossils whose ages have been measured by radiocarbon dating. And yes, there’s an R package — Rextinct […]
6 September 2023. Assessing the massive costs of biological invasions to Australia and the world – A global database set up by scientists to assemble data on the economic cost of biological invasions in support of effective government management strategies has grown to include all known invasive species. Now involving 145 researchers from 44 countries — the current version of InvaCost has 13,553 entries in 22 languages and enables scientists to develop a […]
27 August 2023. Open Letter: Public policy in South Australia regarding dingoes – 08 August 2023 The Honourable Dr Susan Close MP, Deputy Premier and Minister for Climate, Environment and Water, South Australia The Honourable Claire Scriven MLC, Minister for Primary Industries and Regional Development, South Australia Dear Ministers, In light of new genetic research on the identity of ‘wild dogs’ and dingoes across Australia, the undersigned wish […]
28 July 2023. Ancient pathogens released from melting ice could wreak havoc on the world – Shutterstock Science fiction is rife with fanciful tales of deadly organisms emerging from the ice and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting human victims. From shape-shifting aliens in Antarctica, to super-parasites emerging from a thawing woolly mammoth in Siberia, to exposed permafrost in Greenland causing a viral pandemic – the concept is marvellous plot fodder. But just […]