DNA 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)
Abstract: In 1990, Elinor Ostrom published Governing the Commons, a demonstration that communities could successfully manage common pool resources without resorting to individual private property rights or central government control. Yet after decades of theoretical and empirical studies, little is known about whether such success can be facilitated by external actors and, if so, whether those actors must target many institutional factors at once or can focus their actions more narrowly. In a Special Feature of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors try to answer these questions by developing and testing mechanism-based theories of the role of community monitoring in common pool resource management. Ferraro will discuss the results from these studies and, as a vehicle for emphasizing the importance of pre-registered, harmonized, multi-site research projects, he will also briefly present excerpts from a review paper that uncovers the empirical hallmarks of an impending replicability crisis in ecology (and, by extension, in conservation science).
Biography: Paul J. Ferraro is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He collaborates with scientists, lawyers, engineers, and program administrators to develop evidence-based environmental programs and to understand causal relationships, both natural and anthropogenic, in complex environments. He is particularly interested in elucidating the environmental and behavioral mechanisms through which environmental problems arise and through which environmental solutions are successful. As part of this effort, he directs or co-directs two scholar-practitioner collaboration centers (https://epic-evidence.org/ https://centerbear.org/) that focus on creating a culture of deliberate experimentation in environmental organizations to test both the common wisdom and new ideas about how coupled human-natural systems function.
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
A new study on the effects of climate change in five tropical countries has found fisheries are in more trouble than agriculture, and poor people are in the most danger. Distinguished Profess
James Cook University researchers have found brightly coloured fish are becoming increasingly rare as coral declines, with the phenomenon likely to get worse in the future. Christopher Hemingson, a
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Abstract: The past few years have seen unprecedented coral bleaching and mortality on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) but the consequences of this on biodiversity are not yet known. This talk will expl
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