Three recent reports make clear that we should be saving habitat in order to save species. It is pretty simple. Destroy a species’ habitat and you destroy its home.
The government has convened 16 experts to help deliver its plan to save the Great Barrier Reef.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland
The government’s plan to save the Great Barrier Reef hinges on hitting a series of pollution and conservation targets within just a few years. A new expert panel will advise on how best to get there.
Go with the flow: scarce water has allowed Outback species to persist for millennia, where otherwise they might have died out.
Jenny Davis
The Outback covers 70% of Australia, and its water is precious and scarce. Yet there is no joined-up plan to monitor and manage Outback water, despite the wealth of species and communities that depend on it.
Stoats (Mustela erminea), feral cats (Felis catus), red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and black rats (Rattus rattus) are invasive predators in different parts of the world.
Clockwise from top left: Sabec/commons.wikimedia.org (CC BY-SA 3.0); T Doherty; CSIRO/commons.wikimedia.org (CC BY 3.0); 0ystercatcher/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Research published this week shows saving wildlife is much more complicated than killing introduced predators. Killing predators often doesn’t work, and is sometimes actually worse for native wildlife.
What do collections of dead butterflies do for their still-living counterparts?
Andrew D Warren
The dead animal specimens that comprise natural history collections contribute a lot toward scientific understanding of their still-living counterparts – and those that have gone extinct.
There are fewer than 50 Orange-bellied Parrots left in the wild.
AAP Image/Birds Australia
Climate change is one of the biggest threats to the world’s wildlife, but recent projects provide hope that we’ll be able to help species adapt.
The Mountain Pygmy Possum, which is the only Australian mammal confined to the alpine zone of Australian Alps. is extremely vulnerable to climate change.
Matthew Pauza
Nearly half of 200 Australian species are threatened by climate change, according to new research, including the iconic mountain pygmy-possum.
Loggerhead turtle populations are facing a brighter future, but many other species are still in decline, while for others there are no data at all.
AAP Image/Lauren Bath
The Great Barrier Reef is home to some 1,600 species of bony fish, 130 sharks and rays, and turtles, mammals and more. Most have had no population monitoring, meaning we don’t know how well they are faring.
Is it a … or a ….? Dengrogramma enigmatica, discovered in deep water off the coast of Victoria, doesn’t quite fit in anywhere in the animal family tree.
Jørgen Olesen
A large new national park might sound like the best way to protect the critically endangered Leadbeater’s possum. But it won’t do anything to save possums from the major threat of bushfire.
More mines, more roads, as the government puts its drive towards economic development ahead of all else.
AAP Image/Alan Porritt
Amid talk of paths to surplus and investing in infrastructure, both sides of politics seem to have forgotten Australia’s longstanding responsibility to govern sustainably, and not just for the economy.
Research shows monocultures of crops - such as this canola field - can be bad for the environment.
Peter Hayward/Flickr
Monocultures - vast expanses of a single crop - may look pretty, but mounting research shows they are likely bad for environment. And in turn that’s bad news for farms as well.
Every year millions of birds migrate between Australia and the northern Hemisphere.
Mdk572/Wikimedia
Five million shorebirds migrate between Australia and the northern hemisphere, threatened by habitat destruction, and rising seas. How can we protect this natural marvel?
The Leadbeater’s has been formally listed as critically endangered. But unless clearfelling in the possums’ stronghold stops, it will continue down the road of extinction.