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 […]
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 […]
ICON at #VicBioCon21
By Katherine Berthon and Marco Gutiérrez Last month ICON Science was a proud sponsor of the 2021 Victorian Biodiversity Conference (VicBioCon). ICON researchers also helped organise and presented at the conference. It was the first time the conference was held entirely online, and, despite some website updates during a tea break, the whole train ran […]
Invertebrate use of rooftops in Melbourne
Green roofs are a peculiar kind of designed habitat. In already highly urbanised areas, where there is large pressure on efficient land use, green roof retrofits are a key strategy to bring back nature without losing building capital. While green roofs are known to have many economic and social benefits, such as stormwater retention and […]
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 […]
The Little Things that Run the City
How many insect species live in your city? How are they distributed amongst the city’s green spaces? What are the ecological processes they perform and ecosystem services they deliver? What are their most frequent ecological interactions? The Little Things that Run the City is a project that aims to address these and other questions within […]
