Sabbatical at University of Queensland

I am currently on sabbatical at the University of Queensland, where I'll be based until September 2012. I am based with Professor Hugh Possingham's Spatial Ecology Lab. This is a large, dynamic and inter-disciplinary group of researchers who are tackling big questions in ecology and conservation. There are many parallels with the objectives of our own Earth to Ocean Group at SFU, and I have met a lot of people interested in questions such as how to get the biggest bang for the buck when setting priorities for conservation of species and habitats.

Media Relations Award

This week I was presented with the SFU President's Award for Media Relations. This was based on over 50 interviews last year, and various other activities such as public seminars. Most of the interest concerned the ups and downs of Fraser River sockeye, including the Cohen Commission's judicial enquiry into what has been going wrong since the early 1990s. I had testified during the first week of the Commission's hearings in September 2010, including cross-examination on issues concerning sustainable use and conservation. For a busy year of outreach, I credit SFU's excellent press office for helping to get the questions out, and keeping me busy trying to answer them.

The Hakai Network

We have just launched a new partnership between SFU and the Tula Foundation called the Hakai Research Network . This will involve research and education aimed at enhancing sustainable use of natural resources by the people of the Central Coast of BC. There will be two bases: SFU and the Hakai Beach Institute on Calvert Island, a former fishing lodge that is being re-fitted to serve as a field centre supporting research and outreach. I am on the steering committee of this initiative, which will include up to $8 million in funding over the next 8 years for graduate students and postdocs as well as research by scientists from SFU and other organizations. Our website isn't up yet, but I will provide further information as we develop the programs in conjunction with local communities. This initiative dovetails perfectly with my research program based in Bella Bella.

Congratulations Jan Verspoor!

Congratulations to Jan Verspoor, who defended his MSc on Thursday, and survived with no revisions! His study was based on 21 streams around Takla Lake in the upper Fraser Basin in BC. He found significant impacts of nutrients from salmon carcasses on growth of algae and populations of aquatic insects. His first paper has been accepted in the journal "Ecosystems" and we hope to submit the next one next week.

New paper on Cambodian snake conservation

We have just published a paper in Biological Conservation on conservation of Cambodian watersnakes. This study was led by Sharon Brooks, and was part of her PhD, which I co-supervised with Eddie Allison, who is now with Worldfish Malaysia. This study "follows the money" in an attempt to understand how the combination of economics, livelihoods, and biology mix to determine sustainability of the largest snake hunt in the world. See previous papers on this subject in my Publications page. The publication "Planet Earth" has just published a story about this paper.

Reflections on Society Conservation Biology Conference

The symposium that Arne Mooers, Karen Hodges, and I organized on status and trends in Canadian biodiversity went very well, with speakers from across the country reviewing our progress towards the target set by the Convention on Biological Diversity, to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. My talk tried to summarize status and trends for all of coastal British Columbia in 15 minutes! By the end of the session it was clear that while some indicators are going in the right direction (such as increases in protected areas), overall Canada has not met the targets that the country signed up to. This is not surprising, because a recent global analysis showed that this failure to reduce rates of biodiversity loss is generally true around the world. For Canada, climate change and increasing human populations featured prominently in most of the talks as major threats to biodiversity. We are continuing to work with Environment Canada on their formal reports on the biodiversity targets, including options for the future.

So, now that the conference is over, one of my enduring memories concerns the Alberta oil sands. The oil sands came up a lot, and after seeing David Schindler's plenary two days ago, I've decided that I'll have to see the oil sands for myself. The infamous tailings ponds are RIGHT beside the Athabasca River. A breach in a dike will send contaminants into the river, which flows northward via Great Slave Lake eventually to the Arctic Ocean, in a scenario that is too painful to think about. I wonder whether BP and the regulators in the Gulf of Mexico ever seriously thought about their risks. A thousand conservation biologists came away from that talk on Wednesday shaking their heads.

Society Conservation Biology Conference

I've just arrived in Edmonton for a meeting with the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute, as a member of their science committee. This is a world-class program - monitoring a huge array of biodiversity in 1656 sites arrayed in a 20 x 20 km grid across the province. Their website is here.

Tomorrow the Society for Conservation Biology's annual conference begins, where I've helped organize a symposium on status and trends of Canadian biodiversity. More on that later.