Feral honey bees – European bees which have escaped from hives into the wild – are surprisingly useful in Australia. They pollinate over 70% of crops that require pollination, like apples, pears, lucerne, melons, berries, canola. But with Varroa mite, a blood-sucking pest of bees, decimating the feral honey bee population globally, and set to invade Australia in the near future, what can be done to maintain pollination services?
Rewilding is the concept of reintroducing native animals and plants to an area where they have declined or gone extinct.
Continue reading “Rewilding; not just for plants and animals”
I’m not talking here about which supermarket or grocery you shop in, or whether your food was grown locally or comes from overseas, but rather where the crop plants we eat were first discovered and developed as food. Now that we can pretty much eat whatever we want, from wherever we want, whenever we want – do you know where the food you eat first evolved and originated from?
Highly collectable species, especially those that are rare and threatened, can be put at risk from poaching if information describing there location is published. But rather than withholding this information, scientists should publish such data through secure portals so that this knowledge can be used to help conserve and manage the world’s most threatened species.
A new global analysis looking at the distribution of forests and woodlands has ‘found’ 467 million hectares of previously unreported forest in dryland ecosystems – a land area equivalent to 60% of Australia. In this day and age of advanced remote sensing how are such discoveries still possible?
We may have been able to tame the dog – the only large carnivore to now happily coexist with humans. But how does domestication occur and can we learn from it to develop new animal breeds and crop varieties for food?
Science can identify the source of timber and verifying legality. So it should be a simple case to apply the science to new international legislation that aims to limit illegally logged timber in global supply chains. Well not quite, the application of science requires detailed understanding of the timber industry and supply chain dynamics.
Continue reading “Science can identify illegally logged timber – so lets start implementing”
Prof Andy Lowe was shortlisted for the 2016 South Australia Science Excellence Awards. The awards showcase the critical importance of science and research to the development of industry and our society.
Continue reading “South Australian Science Excellence Awards 2016”
There has been a recent recommendation to set restoration baselines as pre-degradation ecological communities. However this is a nostalgic aspiration, akin to restoring the ‘Garden of Eden’. It is unrealistic, expensive and does not acknowledge ecosystem change. Restoration should respond to the current drivers of biodiversity loss by addressing declines in ecosystem function and provisioning of ecosystem services.
Continue reading “Shifting restoration’s mindset away from the ‘Garden of Eden’”
The use of local seed is widely advocated for habitat restoration and is based on the premise that locally sourced seed will be the best adapted for the local conditions at restoration sites.
However, a ‘local is best’ seed sourcing practise (where seed for planting establishment is only sourced from native habitat within a few km of the restoration site) misses two important points, which may be seriously impacting on restoration outcomes, particularly resilience in the face of future environmental and climate change.
Prof Andy Lowe 