Biodiversity conservation cannot afford COVID-19 communication bungles
As COVID-19 continues to dominate our lives and media headlines, maintaining public engagement with biodiversity conservation can be a communication challenge. This media context can make it tempting for conservation professionals like us to draw links or parallels between the pandemic and the biodiversity crisis, with the intention to make stories about biodiversity more relevant […]
Feral Cat Control in Australia – 5-year report
Read the full report here. Since 2015, members of ICON Science have been working with the Office of the Threatened Species Commissioner to assess the national management of feral cats across Australia. This work is part of the wider Threatened Species Strategy, and recognises the significant threat to Australia’s native species that is posed by […]
ICON tells Victoria’s Parliament to ‘walk the walk’ on urban greening
The ICON Science group has submitted our response to the Parliament of Victoria’s ‘Inquiry into Environmental Infrastructure for Growing Populations’. Our city has grown rapidly – has our access to nature kept up? It’s commendable that our leaders have turned their minds to this topic, as COVID-19 has reminded us of the enormous importance of […]
Australia’s Urban Biodiversity: How Is Adaptive Governance Influencing Land-Use Policy?
By Hugh Stanford Image: John Englart / CC BY-SA 2.0 Due to a growing global interconnectedness, the world is a highly uncertain place where the daily lives of individuals are increasingly susceptible to the happenings half a world away. To find examples of this, one only has to look at Australia’s current run through 2020, where […]
What difference do protected areas make on vegetation extent and condition?
Logging road in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Photo by Roshan Sharma. Biodiversity is the variety of all life forms on Earth and underpins the health of our planet. It provides important ecosystem services like food and fibre that are the basis of human existence. However, exploitative human activities on Earth have created an unprecedented breakdown of […]
Trees are hot news this year
First it was the hopeful-but-questionable ‘One Trillion Trees’ initiative, announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, with supporters as diverse as Jane Goodall and Donald Trump. At the same time, large areas of Australia were on fire – in total, estimates are that we lost 20% of our forest cover in the climate-change-driven ‘Black […]
Supporting the long-term stewardship of privately protected areas
Thousands of rural landholders across Australia have entered into permanent conservation agreements to protect Australia’s unique flora and fauna. By turning their properties into privately protected areas (PPA), landholders are providing stewardship of our natural heritage that benefits society. But how can we as a society better support these landholders? Lab members Matthew Selinske, Mat […]
Transforming urban gardeners into land stewards
by Laura Mumaw The American conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote about the importance of practicing a ‘land ethic’, adopting personal responsibility for the health of the land – the soils, waters, plants and animals of a place – for the good of the community. Private land stewardship, caring for native flora and fauna on one’s property, […]
Wildlife gardening for conservation in cities
by Laura Mumaw In this article we explore how the Knox Gardens for Wildlife program, a collaboration between a municipality (Knox City Council) and community group (Knox Environment Society) in greater Melbourne involves residents in gardening to help conserve indigenous biodiversity. We used semi-structured interviews and Council survey data to identify key program features that […]
Why politics and context matter in conservation policy
By Florence Damiens Politics and context matter for conservation policy. That is why our research group, in collaboration with Brian Coffey and Lauren Rickards from RMIT University’s Centre for Urban Research, has just published a collective reply to Peter Kareiva and Emma Fuller’s article in Global Policy. In brief, we argue that Kareiva’s and Fuller’s […]
