ICON team members head across the Pacific
For a while it seemed as if travel was a thing of the past – workshops, conferences and meetings all pivoted online. Whilst this was great for our collective carbon footprint, it perhaps stymied creativity. Meeting virtually doesn’t fulfill the same functions as a face-to-face chat at a conference, where the informal gatherings are often […]
PhD Opportunity: Beyond green facades – integrating natural ecologies and the built environment
PhD Advertisement Title: Beyond green facades – integrating natural ecologies and the built environment Description: This PhD challenges the status quo of ‘green’ architecture by addressing critical research gaps in the fields of natural ecology and the built environment to develop ecologically-driven architectural/landscape/urban design. By integrating ecological knowledge and understanding, designers can produce urban environments […]
From ‘day of the species’ to ‘protecting species every day’
In April, I attended an art exhibition that helps people visualize the biodiversity crisis in Australia. ‘Day of the Species’ is a community art project with contributions from 200+ artists. As a contributing artist, you get to learn about and draw Australian biodiversity under protection by the EPBC Act. As a viewer, you can see […]
In the news: How do the major parties rate on climate, biodiversity?
Catch our own Sarah Bekessy on Studio Ten, TEN Central Digital TV. Sarah rates the major parties’ policies when it comes to protecting biodiversity, threatened species and the climate. Read more
Outreach: Fail: our report card on the government’s handling of Australia’s extinction crisis
Sarah Bekessy, RMIT University and Brendan Wintle, The University of Melbourne Australia is losing more biodiversity than any other developed nation. Already this year the charismatic and once abundant gang gang cockatoo has been added to our national threatened species list, the koala has been listed as endangered and the Great Barrier Reef suffered another […]
Our favourite conservation journal articles of 2021
By Matthew Selinske As in 2020, some of us from ICON Science wanted to share journal papers that we found particularly exciting, insightful, or pertinent to our research. A synopsis of each paper is provided below, and as you would expect from an interdisciplinary team, they cover a diverse range of topics and disciplines. That’s […]
Enhancing biodiversity in cities through design
This article is republished from Cities People Love under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. An interview with Professor Sarah Bekessy Sarah Bekessy is a sustainability and urban planning academic at RMIT University in Melbourne and a leading voice in Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design (BSUD). We interviewed Sarah to understand more about the […]
Outreach: Nurturing nature, designing a home with biodiversity in mind
Sarah Bekessy, Georgia Garrard, Sarrah Hurley, Casey Visintin, Freya Thomas & Holly Kirk There’s a lot you can do to promote biodiversity when you’re designing a new home or renovation, with clear benefits for you and your family as well as for the natural environment…
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 […]
Outreach: How should I vote if I care about preventing the extinction of nature?
Almost 9 in 10 Australians agree we should invest in restoring wildlife habitats and natural places.Klaus/Flickr, CC BY-SA Sarah Bekessy, RMIT University; Alex Kusmanoff, RMIT University; Ascelin Gordon, RMIT University; Emily Gregg, RMIT University; Freya Thomas, RMIT University; Georgia Garrard, RMIT University; Holly Kirk, RMIT University; Jeremy Ringma, RMIT University; Katherine Berthon, RMIT University; Lindall […]
