Native or not? Red cabbage palms found in Palm Valley in the Northern Territory were introduced by Aboriginal people thousands of years ago.
Jurriaan Persyn
New molecular techniques show that an iconic palm only grows in central Australia because humans moved it there thousands of years ago. It poses the question: should we still regard this as a native species…
New research has found the less often a Tasmanian Devil is bitten, the more likely it is to contract Devil Face Tumour Disease…
A tiger photographed at 3,000m asl by Bhutanese researchers using a remote camera in the year 2000. How then could the BBC claim discovery of tigers at high altitude a decade later?
In September 2010, the BBC announced a stunning discovery of tigers (Panthera tigris) living at high altitude in the Himalayas. The article claimed that a BBC team had discovered first hand evidence of…
Eastern long-necked turtles, once common and abundant, are now greatly reduced throughout much of their range.
Damien Naidoo
Turtles are great evolutionary survivors. With their iconic shells and ponderously slow pace of life, they have plodded through 220 million years of natural selective pressures. In the face of forces that…
Beware the hyperbole: Campbell Newman has vowed to axe the Wild Rivers legislation, but what’s the reality beneath the rhetoric?
AAP/Alan Porritt
Those who follow the Wild Rivers debates in Queensland probably know better than to trust the headlines. When, in January 2010, Tony Abbott announced a federal intervention into the state’s environmental…
No simple matter: logging and conservation are not polar opposites, and controlled harvesting can fund the protection of forests.
AAP/Greenpeace/Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
Is there a role for logging in ensuring the future of the world’s tropical forests and their rich diversity of plants and animals? For many this idea is absurd, because timber production achieving conservation…
Extinct: the Christmas Island Pipistrelle.
Lindy Lumsden
When it comes to mammal extinctions, Australia’s track record over the last 200 years has been abysmal. Since European settlement, nearly half of the world’s mammalian extinctions have occurred in Australia…
An important ‘apex predator’ that should neither be hunted as an enemy nor treated as a pet. With respect and wisdom, we can coexist.
AAP/Tony Phillips
It’s the dry season in the Northern Territory, and for many people that means camping under a clear winter’s sky in the Top End. Yet rediscovering nature can be a fraught exercise in wilderness areas like…
Our parks are an incredible asset, and if we ran them more like a business we would see that.
AAP/Patrick Horton
National parks are among Australia and New Zealand’s most precious assets. But we don’t account for them properly, so they’re struggling. It’s time for a rethink. The assets managed by the parks agencies…
Quarries and quandaries: Australia’s natural splendour is a major source of income, yet it sits uncomfortably with mining’s spread.
AAP/Fantasea Adventure Cruising
Australia has built a strong global brand based on its iconic natural beauty. For example, the new Australia Tourism campaign, “There’s nothing like Australia”, features icons like the Kimberley, Uluru…
To know how to ease the damage we do, we must first take stock of the natural world. New Zealand does; Australia does not.
Flickr/borkazoid
In 1992-93, 168 countries including Australia and New Zealand signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) acknowledging an urgent need to halt ongoing decline in the planet’s biodiversity. In its…
Queue for iPad 2 in Sydney: green activists targeting companies and governments should realise that those ‘enemies’ reflect the values of the money and consumption-hungry populace.
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
The recent news out of the RIO+20 summit is dire. No collective pre-agreement, no institutional change, no investment. The difference between RIO+20 and Kyoto was that at least Kyoto created an agreement…
Arise marsupial: the NSW town of Campbelltown could be the place to claw back Big Koala status from this one at Dadswell Bridge, Victoria.
Flickr/pixelhut
One of Campbelltown Council’s councillors, facing re-election in the upcoming elections, recently suggested that the city should construct a “Big Koala” (BK) in the style of other “big local features…
Paleontological records and records of past endangered species have been linked to learning about modern ecology and conservation…
Networks of nature: a potato cod with striped cleaner wrasse at Osprey Reef, an area in the expanded marine reservations announced today.
Flickr/richard ling
Today’s announcement of a national network of marine parks is really a memorable day for Australian nature conservation. The political rhetoric and self-congratulation associated with major events is often…
How bad do things have to get before we want to seriously address environmental issues?
AAP
The fifth edition of the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-5) - a global environmental report card by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) - reads like the results for a sedentary, middle-aged…
A shortage of their usual food sources may be pushing wombats to eat toxic weeds.
Jenny Scott
Over the past 18 months, increasing numbers of southern hairy nosed wombats in the Murraylands region have been found in poor to emaciated condition with damage to their skin and other organs. The skin…
When you buy imported products, are you buying dead endangered species as well?
Mark Hudson
The tide of globalisation drives development, providing jobs and much needed dollars. But development and trade consumes local biodiversity, much of it in the iconic biodiversity hotspots of tropical countries…
We don’t have enough money to save all species, but would invertebrates get a look in if the public chose what lived and died?
Howard Rawson
At current levels of funding, it is not possible to save all threatened species in Australia from extinction. Trade-offs are required. For example, managers could concentrate efforts on the most threatened…
Vietnam’s growing economic prosperity, and demand for cute pets, has given its gibbons a bleak future.
Clare Campbell
Gibbons are among our closest living relatives. These small apes are beautiful singers and glorious swingers. But a new survey of their numbers has found an economic boom in Vietnam is eating up their…
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University