Essential role of carnivores on the wane
This interesting review has just come out in Science, and because I was given a heads-up about it, I decided to do a F1000 recommendation. That’s more or less what follows, with some additional...
View Article50/500 or 100/1000 debate not about time frame
As you might recall, Dick Frankham, Barry Brook and I recently wrote a review in Biological Conservation challenging the status quo regarding the famous 50/500 ‘rule’ in conservation management...
View ArticleIce Age? No. Abrupt warmings and hunting together polished off Holarctic...
Did ice ages cause the Pleistocene megafauna to go extinct? Contrary to popular opinion, no, they didn’t. But climate change did have something to do with them, only it was global warming events...
View ArticleNo 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...
View ArticleBad 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...
View ArticleInexorable 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...
View ArticleNothing like a good forest
Our history and culture are intimately tied to the planet’s forests and the services they provide to all living beings. In modern times, forests also help combat the impacts of anthropogenic climate...
View ArticleThe Great Dying
Here’s a presentation I gave earlier in the year for the Flinders University BRAVE Research and Innovation series: There is No Plan(et) B — What you can do about Earth’s extinction emergency Earth is...
View ArticleThe politics of environmental destruction
You’d think I’d get tired of this, wouldn’t you? Alas, the fight does wear me down, but I must persist. My good friend and colleague, the legendary Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, as...
View ArticleWhat is a ‘mass extinction’ and are we in one now?
(reproduced from The Conversation) — For more than 3.5 billion years, living organisms have thrived, multiplied and diversified to occupy every ecosystem on Earth. The flip side to this explosion of...
View ArticleWant to work with us?
Today we announced a HEAP of positions in our Global Ecology Lab for hot-shot, up-and-coming ecologists. If you think you’ve got what it takes, I encourage you to apply. The positions are all financed...
View ArticleDon’t blame it on the dingo
Our postdoc, Tom Prowse, has just had one of the slickest set of reviews I’ve ever seen, followed by a quick acceptance of what I think is a pretty sexy paper. Earlier this year his paper in Journal of...
View ArticleConservation: 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...
View ArticleCleaning 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...
View ArticleDid people or climate kill off the megafauna? Actually, it was both
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. — Earth is now firmly in the grips of its sixth “mass extinction event”, and it’s mainly...
View ArticleExtinction cascades
A recent online interview I did on the role of extinction cascades in mass extinctions:
View ArticleWorried about Earth’s future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists...
Daniel Mariuz/AAP Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Flinders University; Daniel T. Blumstein, University of California, Los Angeles, and Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University Anyone with even a passing interest in the...
View ArticleInfluential conservation papers of 2022
Following my annual tradition, I present the retrospective list of the ‘top’ 20 influential papers of 2022 as assessed by experts in Faculty Opinions (formerly known as F1000). These are in no...
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