Introduction
Program
Presenters
Public Forum
Register HereDNA reveals the past and future of coral reefs
New DNA techniques are being used to understand how coral reacted to the end of the last ice age in order to better predict how they will cope with current changes to the climate. James Cook Univer
From 2005 to 2022, the main node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies was headquartered at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland (Australia)
UPDATE: Videos of the presentations are available!
You can watch all videos in the viewer on the top right corner of this page, or select individual videos from the Youtube playlist here.
A symposium celebrating the birth, development and achievements of coral reef sciences will be held at the Shine Dome in Canberra on 7th and 8th October 2010. The ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies will be presenting the conference program with assistance from the Australian Academy of Science and The Royal Society, which is celebrating its 350th anniversary. The Canberra symposium will incorporate presentations by members of both national academies and the ARC Centre of Excellence and provide an insight into the future of these iconic ecosystems.
The Royal Society has a long history of involvement with research on the Great Barrier Reef. In 1928 they sponsored C. M. Yonge to lead an expedition to the Lowe Isles off Port Douglas in northern Queensland. This was the world’s first detailed scientific study of coral and coral reefs. Less than 100 year later, Australian coral reef science and reef management lead the world, and every year close to 200 international scientists travel to the Great Barrier Reef to pursue their research.
2010 is also the International Year of Biodiversity. Coral reef biodiversity underpins the critically important functions and services performed by reef ecosystems, such as sustaining the productivity of fish stocks on which many tropical nations depend for their food security and future development. The latest science on understanding and managing coral reef biodiversity will be a feature of the symposium program.
Our objectives are to:
Key issues will include:
Four events are scheduled:
UPDATE: Videos of the presentations are available!
You can watch all videos in the viewer on the top right corner of this page, or select individual videos from the Youtube playlist here.
| Multiple sex change in mushroom corals | Yossi Loya |
30:13 |
| Virginia Chadwick Memorial Foundation | John Tanzer |
9:32 |
| Virginia Chadwick Award presentation: Does biodiversity confer a degree of ecological insurance? |
Andrew Hoey |
15:56 |
| Science and monitoring on the Great Barrier Reef: past, present, future | Terry Hughes |
15:05 |
| The coral record of impacts of European settlement on the river catchments of the Great Barrier Reef | Malcolm McCulloch |
16:22 |
| Incorporating ecological baselines in coral reef management and environmental policy | John Pandolfi |
20:34 |
| The state of resilience science – topics of interest and challenges. | Brian Walker |
20:56 |
| Ocean acidification: unravelling the complexities of its impacts on coral reefs | Ove Hoegh-Guldberg |
16:39 |
| Dispersal, connectivity, and the maintenance of coral biodiversity | Sean Connolly |
16:53 |
| Understanding the complexity of symbiotic partnerships that govern coral health in a warming world | Bette Willis |
20:00 |
| Genomic insights into the biology of the coral holobiont | David Miller |
15:41 |
| The coral holobiont sensing a changing environment | Tracy Ainsworth |
14:43 |
| A lipidomic approach to understanding cnidarian-dinoflagellate symbiosis | Simon Dunn |
17:45 |
| Transcriptomic response of Acropora millepora juveniles to Ocean acidification. | Aurelie Moya |
14:44 |
| Looking into the black box of the Symbiodinium genomics | Bill Leggat |
19:06 |
| Past and future adaptation of corals to sea surface temperature | Madeleine van Oppen/Line Bay |
16:56 |
| Cold-water corals | J Murray Roberts |
21:43 |
| The Outlook for the Great Barrier Reef – Standing at the crossroad | David Wachenfeld |
23:20 |
| Marine reserves as fisheries management tools on coral reefs | Garry Russ |
24:34 |
| Management of marine mega-fauna as climate change progresses | Mariana Fuentes |
17:07 |
| Bridging the gap between regional-scale conservation design and local-scale conservation action in the Coral Triangle | Bob Pressey |
20:14 |
| Research partnerships and community-based coral reef management in Papua New Guinea | Glenn Almany |
18:14 |
| The potential for adaptive co-management of small-scale fisheries in the developing world | Louisa Evans |
17:19 |
| What makes for success in coral reef co-management | Joshua Cinner |
18:09 |
| Indirect impacts of habitat change on coral reef fishes | Mark McCormick |
20:02 |
| Disturbance and recovery of reefs in Aceh | Andrew Baird |
18:39 |
| Flexible fishes in a rapidly changing coral reef environment | Chris Fulton |
14:16 |
| The role of behaviour in the conservation and management of reef fishes | Bob Warner/ Elizabeth Madin |
21:37 |
| Do marine reserves enhance important coral reef fisheries? | Geoff Jones |
19:18 |
| Extinction vulnerability of coral reef fishes in response to climate change and fisheries exploitation | Nick Graham |
16:09 |
| Is ocean acidification a threat to fish populations? | Philip Munday |
14:57 |
UPDATE: Videos of the presentations are available!
You can watch all videos in the viewer on the top right corner of this page, or select individual videos from the Youtube playlist here.
Dr Tracy Ainsworth
Dr Tracy Ainsworth is an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. Her PhD research investigated the histopathology and microbial ecology of stress and disease in reef corals. Tracy’s broad research interests include stress responses, cell biology, immunity and disease of marine invertebrates.
Dr Glenn Almany
Glenn is an ARC Future Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. His expertise is in the ecology of reef fishes, and he works with local communities, NGOs and governments to improve the management and conservation of coral reefs and their fisheries. Current projects include measuring larval fish dispersal, understanding how dispersal impacts fisheries management and biodiversity conservation strategies, and developing new approaches to systematic conservation planning in the Coral Triangle region.
Dr Joshua Cinner
Dr Cinner’s research explores how socio-economic factors influence the ways in which people use, perceive, and govern natural resources, with a specific focus on coral reef social-ecological systems. He works on interdisciplinary research topics such as defining the socio-economic factors that drive successful conservation, understanding resilience and thresholds in coral reef social-ecological systems, examining and operationalizing vulnerability to environmental change, and examining the applicability of Western conservation models in developing countries. Dr. Cinner is a Senior Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University. He has worked on human dimensions of marine conservation in Australia, Jamaica, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Indonesia, and the USA.
Professor Sean Connolly
Professor Sean Connolly is a Chief Investigator and Program Leader with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and a Professorial Fellow within the School of Marine and Tropical Biology at James Cook University. Sean combines mathematical and statistical modelling with fieldwork and laboratory experiments to study the dynamics of biological turnover at all scales, including population dynamics, species interactions and biodiversity, and macroevolution. Sean currently holds an Australian Professorial Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, and was most recently honoured by the award of the 2009 Fenner Medal of the Australian Academy of Science, for pioneering new approaches to understanding biodiversity.
Dr Simon Dunn
Dr Simon Dunn is a Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies undertaking research at the Global Change Institute and the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on changes in gene expression and the molecular and cellular interactions associated with the onset, maintenance and breakdown of cnidarian-dinoflagellate symbiosis.
Dr Louisa Evans
Louisa is a social scientist with interests in governance of marine systems in developing countries. Her PhD, completed through the University of East Anglia (UK), used institutional analysis and political ecology to explore issues of inclusion, knowledge and complexity in marine social-ecological systems in Kenya. Following this, Louisa moved to the WorldFish Center in Malaysia to continue work in resilience thinking and how these concepts can be applied to small-scale fisheries in the developing world. Louisa has recently started as a postdoctoral fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies looking primarily at integrating resilience and other systems approaches with human development perspectives to understand and develop governance approaches that are better at addressing the synergies and trade-offs between poverty reduction, adaptation strategies and ecological sustainability.
Dr Mariana Fuentes
Dr. Mariana Fuentes recently started as an ARC Super Science postdoctoral fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, where she aims to develop systematic priorities for the management of marine mega-fauna to increase their resilience to climate change. Her broad scientific interest lies in informing the conservation and management of threatened marine mega-fauna in a changing climate using a range of approaches including spatial risk assessments and systematic conservation and management planning.
Dr Chris Fulton
Dr Chris Fulton is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and a lecturer in Marine Ecology at The Australian National University. Chris completed his PhD on the ecomorphology of coral reef fishes at James Cook University (2005), followed by a post-doctoral position in macroalgal community dynamics at JCU (2005-2006), before taking up his current lectureship. Chris’s research explores how biophysical coupling influences patterns of coral reef biodiversity over space and time. Combining techniques in oceanography, functional morphology, physiology and biogeography, Chris’s work has revealed how coral reef organisms meet the challenges imposed by their physical environment in locations throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the Red Sea.
Dr Nick Graham
Dr Nick Graham is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow and Queensland Smart Futures Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University. He is an applied coral reef scientist working on large scale ecological questions directly relevant to sustainable management and conservation. He has assessed the long-term impacts of climate induced coral bleaching on coral reef fish assemblages, fisheries and ecosystem stability. He has also worked extensively on the ecological ramifications of fishing and closed area management to reef systems. Nick is now turning his efforts towards understanding the patterns and processes by which coral reefs degraded by coral bleaching recover, and how this can be incorporated into, or influenced by, management action.
Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is a Deputy Director in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, Director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, and a Queensland Premier’s Smart State Fellow (2008-2013). His research interests span a broad range of topics including marine biology, evolution, physiology, biochemistry and molecular biology of plant-animal symbioses, co-evolution, coral bleaching and climate change. Ove is Chair of the GEF/World Bank Working Group on Coral Bleaching and Related Ecological disturbances,one of five expert groups within the IOC and World Bank Coastal Program’s Global Coral Reef Targeted Research and Capacity Building Project. Ove has published over 160 papers, including 15 in Science or Nature. He is reviewing editor at Science Magazine.
Andrew Hoey
Andrew Hoey is a PhD candidate in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. Prior to his PhD Andrew worked for several years as a laboratory manager for David Bellwood and has undertaken research on reef systems spanning the Indian and Pacific Oceans. His research focuses on the functional interactions between reef fishes and benthic algae, and the relationship between biological diversity and ecosystem resilience. His PhD research investigated the role of macroalgal browsing fishes on coral reefs. In 2009, he was invited by the IUCN to present his research at the International Marine Conservation Congress in Washington DC. Andrew was awarded a 2009 Virginia Chadwick Award for best student publication from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Studies for his paper on the role of macroalgal browsing fishes on the Great Barrier Reef.
Professor Terry Hughes
Terry Hughes is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and a Federation Fellow (2002-2012). He has broad research interests in ecology, marine biology and the social-ecological dynamics of coral reefs. He has published over 100 influential scientific papers, including 17 papers in Science and Nature. Terry was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2001 in recognition of “a career which has significantly advanced the world’s store of scientific knowledge”. Terry won the 2007 Sherman Eureka Prize for Environmental Research and in 2008 was awarded the prestigious quadrennial Darwin Medal by the International Society for Reef Studies. He is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher, ranked #1 in Australia for citations in Ecology and Evolution.
Professor Geoffrey Jones
Geoffrey P Jones (PhD, Univ. of Auckland 1980) is currently a Professor in the School of Marine and Tropical Biology, and ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University. His general field of research is in marine conservation biology, with primary expertise in the ecology, behaviour and conservation of tropical and temperate reef fishes. His most recent research centres on dispersal, habitat specialization, habitat change and strategies for conserving reef biodiversity. He has published over 140 scientific articles and supervised over 100 graduate students in this field.
Dr Bill Leggat
Bill is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. Bill studies the dinoflagellate Symbiodinium, and his research focuses on linking changes in the gene expression of Symbiodinium to physiological of the algae and the intact coral holobiont (its host), and subsequent ecological changes. In particular, he is interested in how these dinoflagellates respond to human induced stress, such as climate change, what effects these changes have on the coral host and how these responses of the alga effect the future of coral reefs as we know them.
Professor Yossi Loya
Professor Yossi Loya is a Raynor Professor of Environmental Conservation Research at Tel Aviv University (TAU) Israel; Chair of the Scientific Management Committee ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies; Co-Chair of the GEF/World Bank Working Group on Coral Bleaching and Related Ecological Disturbances, within the IOC and World Bank Global Coral Reef Targeted Research and Capacity Building Project. He served as Chairman of the Zoology Department (1989-90) and Dean (1990-95) of the Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University (TAU), Founder and Chairman of the Porter School for Environmental studies at TAU (1996-2000). His research interests focus primarily on ecology of reef corals, spanning broad range of topics, including: coral community structure, life history, reproductive strategies, biodiversity, conservation and management, evolution, physiology, oil pollution, coral diseases, bleaching and climate change. He has published over 210 papers, including 9 in Science or Nature. In 2000 he was awarded the prestigious Darwin Medal by the International Society for Reef Studies. His most recent recognition is being elected in 2009 as a Fellow to the Israeli Academy of Science (first ecologist in the Academy).
Dr Elizabeth Madin
Dr. Elizabeth Madin is a US National Science Foundation International Postdoctoral Fellow based at the University of Technology, Sydney. Elizabeth’s broad research interests include behavioural and community ecology, effects of fisheries on marine communities, and marine conservation. Her NSF postdoctoral research, in collaboration with Dr. Dave Booth (UTS) and Dr. Phil Munday (JCU), focuses on understanding latitudinal variation in the effects of fisheries on coastal marine systems. Her doctoral research investigated behavioural ecology of coral reef systems in the remote Line Islands, in particular the role that fishing plays in driving top-down, behavioural effects. She received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1999 to do research at JCU and again in 2007 for collaboration at AIMS, and in 2009 she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Professor Malcolm McCulloch
Professor Malcolm McCulloch is a Deputy Director of the ARC Centre and the Western Australian Premier’s Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Malcolm’s research interests focus on the modern part of the geologic record using isotopic and trace element geochemical methods to determine how climate and anthropogenic processes have influenced both past and present environments with particular emphasis on coral reefs. Malcolm has received a number of prestigious awards, most recently in 2010 he was elected as a Fellow to The Royal Society. In 2009 he was awarded the Jaeger Medal for his career achievement in the Earth Sciences and has Fellowships of the Australian Academy of Science (2004), the Geological Society of Australia (2007), the Geochemical Society (2008) and the American Geophysical Union (2002). His 228 scientific papers have been published in leading international journals including 23 in Science or Nature.
Professor David Miller
David Miller is a program leader at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. His work is aimed at understanding how corals and the coral holobiont (the coral animal and its associated symbionts and bacteria) function at the molecular level. Major advances in DNA sequencing technology over the last few years mean that these are now realistic and achievable goals. David’s laboratory and those of his collaborators have pioneered the use of Acropora millepora as a model coral for gene expression analysis, enabling substantial advances to be made in understanding some general principles of coral biology. The coral genome has also provided some remarkable and surprising insights into the general principles of development and genome evolution in the animal kingdom.
Dr Aurelie Moya
Dr Aurelie Moya is an European Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. She aims at understanding the molecular response of early life stages of corals to ocean acidification. For that purpose, she is using the resources generated by the Acropora millepora genome and transcriptome projects, which give a powerful tool to understand how the physiology of corals is likely to change, and identify which molecular processes are highly vulnerable to ocean acidification. Aurelie is originally from France. She completed a PhD at the Scientific Centre of Monaco (2004-2007) and a two-years lecturer position at the University of Nice (2007-2009) before joining the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in 2009.
Professor Philip Munday
Professor Philip Munday has broad interests in the biology and ecology of marine fishes. His current research program focuses on understanding and predicting the impacts of climate change on populations and communities of coral reef fishes, both directly through changes in the physical environment and indirectly through effects on coral reef habitat. Using a range of laboratory and field experiments he is investigating the effects of increased temperature and ocean acidification on reef fish populations and testing their capacity for acclimation and adaptation to a rapidly changing environment. He has published 90 papers in coral reef ecology, including reviews and research papers on the impacts of climate change. Philip is an Australian Research Council QEII Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and the School of Marine and Tropical Biology, at James Cook University.
Professor John Pandolfi
John Pandolfi is Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, and Centre for Marine Science, University of Queensland and a chief investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. He has published more than 80 scientific articles. He likes hunting for fossils because they help him to uncover the past history of living coral reefs. John has recently been recognized as one of the top 20 highly cited climate change scientists in the world. John was recently appointed President of the Australian Coral Reef Society.
Dr Morgan Pratchett
Dr Morgan Pratchett is an Australian Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University. Morgan graduated from James Cook University in 2002, and has since published 50 papers based on research conducted throughout the South Pacific. He has just returned from the USA where he was based at the National Coral Reef Institute in Florida, supported by an American Australian Association fellowship.
Professor Bob Pressey
Professor Bob Pressey is a Program Leader in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. His research includes aspects of spatial data sets on biodiversity, geographic information systems, software development, and the socio-economic issues involved in implementing conservation action. During almost 20 years as a research scientist for the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service he developed and applied leading-edge techniques in conservation planning, influenced policy and conservation practice, and began a long series of international collaborations. In 2002 he was awarded The Royal Botanic Gardens’ Eureka Prize for Biodiversity Research. In 2008 he was awarded the inaugural Australian Ecology Research Award from the Ecological Society of Australia. His most recent recognition is being elected in 2010 as a Fellow to the Australian Academy of Science.
Dr J Murray Roberts
Murray Roberts is a Reader in Marine Biodiveristy at Heriot-Watt University. He studied Biology at the University of York before completing a PhD at the University of Glasgow examining nitrogen cycling in the Anemonia viridis symbiosis. Since 1997 his work on cold-water corals has taken him to sites off Norway, Ireland and the SE United States. He discovered the Mingulay cold-water coral reef complex off Scotland in 2003, the only known inshore coral reef in UK waters. In 2007 he undertook a two-year Marie Curie fellowship to develop the first international trans-Atlantic study of cold-water corals, TRACES. He is senior author of the ‘Cold-water Corals’, the first book covering the biology and geology of these important deep-sea habitats.
Professor Garry Russ
Professor Garry Russ is Leader of Program 3 (Marine Reserves and Connectivity) in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University. Garry received a prestigious Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation (1999-2002) jointly with long-term colleague AC Alcala. Garry is one of only three Australian-born scientists to receive this award.
Dr Petra Souter
Dr Petra Souter is a postdoctoral researcher with Dr Madeleine van Oppen at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Her research looks into several aspects of adaptation to environmental stress in corals. Its main focus is functional and ecological genomics, with links to genetic connectivity, reproduction, physiology, adaptation and acclimatisation.
John Tanzer
John Tanzer is an environmental consultant and Managing Director of Environmental Pathways and Solutions, providing advice to government, non-government and industry bodies on marine, coastal and fisheries issues. Currently he is working as specialist advisor to international NGOs and an Alliance of Australian teaching and research institutions on the Coral Triangle Initiative. From 1997 to 2008 he was an Executive Director at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority where he oversaw the development of the rezoning of the Park, which has seen the highly protected area increased from 4.5% to around 33%. He was also Chair of the Queensland Fisheries Management Authority in the early to mid 1990’s. He has worked in natural resource management and policy since graduating with an honours degree in Geography in 1980 from JCU. He also has a Masters of Environmental Law (ANU).
Dr Madeleine van Oppen
Dr Madeleine van Oppen is a principal research scientist in the Understanding Marine Microbes and Symbioses research team, and director of the Centre for Marine Microbiology and Genetics at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Her research group uses a combination of genetic and genomic approaches with physiology and ecology to study the potential of reef corals to acclimatise and adapt to climate change, the connectivity among coral reef populations, and the value and impact of certain management actions to enhance reef coral resilience.
Dr David Wachenfeld
Dr David Wachenfeld is the Chief Scientist and the Director of the Science Co-ordination Group at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. In this role, he has responsibility for co-ordinating the delivery, analysis, management and presentation of all the information needed to manage the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. He has lived in Australia and worked on the Great Barrier Reef since 1992. During this time he has had eighteen years experience in research, management and education relating to the Great Barrier Reef. David studied marine biology at the University of London, receiving his degree in 1988. He went on to research the coral reefs of Egypt and Zanzibar for his PhD, which he received in 1993.
Dr Brian Walker
Dr Brian Walker is a Research Fellow with CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems and is also Program Director and Chair of the Board of the Resilience Alliance, an international research group working on sustainability of social-ecological systems. He is an internationally experienced scientist working on ecological sustainability and resilience in social-ecological systems. A key focus of his work is the significance of resilience in the sustainability of ecosystems and social-ecological systems. Dr Walker is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry. He has served on numerous national and international Boards and Committees. He has co-authored two books and published over 160 scientific papers.
Professor Bob Warner
Bob Warner is a professor and Chair of Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1973. After spending two years as a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in the Republic of Panama, he was appointed to the faculty at Santa Barbara. He was founding Chair of the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology until 1998, and is currently serving in that capacity again. Warner’s work lies in two areas, both dealing primarily with marine fishes. The first area is in behavioral ecology, focusing on the evolution of reproductive strategies. The other active area of Warner’s published research is in recruitment, conservation, and ecology of marine fishes. His research (over 145 publications) has primarily taken place off the California coast, Panama, the Virgin Islands, Palmyra atoll, Japan, and Corsica.
Professor Bette Willis
Professor Bette Willis is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and a Professor in the School of Marine and Tropical Biology at James Cook University. She also Co-chairs the GEF/World Bank Working Group on Coral Disease. Her research has addressed a broad range of questions concerning the biology and ecology of reef corals over the past 20 years, particularly in relation to ocean warming. Currently, her research activities are directed at assessing the ecological significance and environmental drivers of coral disease on Indo-Pacific reefs; exploring how algal endosymbiosis affects the physiology of the coral host, particularly in relation to thermal stress; and understanding the roles of innate immunity and coral-associated bacteria in coral health.
UPDATE: Videos of the presentations are available!
You can watch all videos in the viewer on the top right corner of this page, or select individual videos from the Youtube playlist here.
Dr Janice Lough
Coral history books: new chapters from Western Australian reefs
Coral reefs contain their own history books in annually banded massive coral skeletons. Cores from such corals provide perspectives on past coral reef climates and environmental impacts – beyond the range of instrumental observations. New WA coral reef cores are now sharing their secrets.
Dr Janice Lough is a Senior Principal Research Scientist leading the Responding to Climate Change Team at the Australian Institute of Marine Science and a Partner Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Reef Studies. Trained as a climatologist at the Climate Research Unit (UK), her research interests focus on understanding the nature, causes and impacts of climate variability and climate change in tropical marine environments. She also specializes in obtaining historical perspectives on coral reefs and the significance of currently observed changes using the rich archive of proxy environmental information contained in long-lived massive coral skeletons.
Professor Malcolm McCulloch
The coral record of impacts of European settlement on the river catchments of the Great Barrier Reef
Professor Malcolm McCulloch is a Deputy Director of the ARC Centre and the Western Australian Premier’s Fellow at the University of Western Australia. Malcolm’s research interests focus on the modern part of the geologic record using isotopic and trace element geochemical methods to determine how climate and anthropogenic processes have influenced both past and present environments with particular emphasis on coral reefs. Malcolm has received a number of prestigious awards, most recently in 2010 he was elected as a Fellow to The Royal Society. In 2009 he was awarded the Jaeger Medal for his career achievement in the Earth Sciences and has Fellowships of the Australian Academy of Science (2004), the Geological Society of Australia (2007), the Geochemical Society (2008) and the American Geophysical Union (2002). His 228 scientific papers have been published in leading international journals including 23 in Science or Nature.
Dr Natalie Ban
The changing nature of marine protected areas
Marine protected areas have been getting much attention recently in Australia. Why do we need them? This presentation provides a global overview of the need for marine protected areas, how they work, and their changing nature.
Natalie Ban is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in Program 6 (Conservation Planning for a Sustainable Future) at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University. Natalie’s broad research interests include incorporating dynamics into conservation planning, marine protected area design that includes ecological and socioeconomic objectives, and human uses and impacts on the marine environment (including ecosystem services). Her postdoctoral research will comprehensively assess the role of an important and hitherto largely ignored set of biodiversity processes, patch dynamics, in conservation planning. She recently (November 2008) completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Dr Laurence McCook
The Great Barrier Reef: a globally significant demonstration of the benefits of marine reserve networks
Dr Laurence McCook manages ecosystem health and resilience for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and has been responsible for the strategic coordination of the scientific information needed to protect the Great Barrier Reef. Laurence has extensive scientific experience, including the ecological processes underlying coral reef resilience and degradation and the effects of marine reserve networks. He has strong interests in the application of science to environmental management, including public perceptions of scientific uncertainty, burden of proof, shifting baselines, and the interface between environmental and economic values. In 2005, Laurence was awarded an international Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation, focused on the resilience of coral reefs under climate change, and has recently run a series of workshops on coral reef management for reef managers and communities across Indonesia.
Professor David Bellwood
Humans on coral reefs: cooking the golden goose
David’s talk will look at the way humans interact with ecosystems and ask if there any hope for the future of coral reefs. David’s world contains fishes and all the other things. His goal is to see a world where fishing is a healthy activity for humans and coral reefs.
Professor David Bellwood is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and a Professor in the School of Marine and Tropical Biology at James Cook University. He has broad research interests in the evolution and ecology of coral reefs fishes, with over 130 articles in leading international journals. Through a series of influential papers (eight in Science or Nature), he has pioneered the application of ecosystem function approaches to the study of reef fishes and in the evaluation of ecosystem impacts of biodiversity. In the last few years his primary goal has been to identify critical functional groups and the key reef processes that underpin coral reef resilience.
New DNA techniques are being used to understand how coral reacted to the end of the last ice age in order to better predict how they will cope with current changes to the climate. James Cook Univer
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