Future too warm for baby sharks
New research has found as climate change causes the world’s oceans to warm, baby sharks are born smaller, exhausted, undernourished and into environments that are already difficult for them to survi
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
James Cook University Townsville
Queensland 4811 Australia
Phone: 61 7 4781 4000
Email: info@coralcoe.org.au
Steven was born in South Africa, studied computer science and maths as an undergrad there (University of Natal), followed by a PhD in computer science at Stanford in the U.S., and now 15 years at AT&T Research.
Indices for site prioritization are widely used as a means of addressing the question: which sites are the most important for conservation of biodiversity? We investigate the theoretical underpinnings of target-based prioritization indices, which prioritize sites according to the degree to which they contribute to achieving a set of predetermined conservation targets. We show a strong connection between existing work on site prioritization and the mathematical theory of voting power. Some well-known paradoxes of voting power also apply to commonly-used site prioritization indices; by negating such paradoxes, we develop a set of intuitive axioms that we would like a single-species site prioritization index to obey. We introduce an extremely simple new index, called “fraction-of-spare,” that satisfies all the axioms. As an experimental evaluation, we study the multi-year scheduling of site acquisitions for conservation of forest types in New South Wales, under specific assumptions about clearing rates. We find that for this application, the fraction-of-spare index outperforms 52 existing prioritization indices. We are also able to compute the optimal schedule of acquisitions (under the assumed clearing rates) using mathematical programming techniques, which allows us to conclude that there is still further potential for improvement in the use of site prioritization indices for conservation scheduling.
New research has found as climate change causes the world’s oceans to warm, baby sharks are born smaller, exhausted, undernourished and into environments that are already difficult for them to survi
A new study shows the coastal protection coral reefs currently provide will start eroding by the end of the century, as the world continues to warm and the oceans acidify. A team of researchers led
A team of scientists led by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) won one of the nation’s top science awards at tonight’s ‘Oscars of Australian science’, the Eureka P
An analytical tool will be used to assess the climate risks facing historic World Heritage sites in Africa—the ruins of two great 13th century ports and the remains of a palace and iron-making indus
Abstract: It is a little over a decade since research commenced into the effects of anthropogenic ocean acidification on marine fishes. In that time, we have learned that projected end-of-century
Abstract: Increased uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has caused the world’s ocean to become more acidic. Different marine habitats are known to have varying ranges of CO2 across mul
Abstract: The Allen Coral Atlas (http://allencoralatlas.org) partnership uses high-resolution satellite imagery, machine learning, and field data to map and monitor the world’s coral reefs at unp
Abstract: Climate change is causing the average surface temperature of the oceans to rise and increasing the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves. In addition, absorption of additional CO2
Abstract: Marine environments are a concealing medium, where observations of natural fish behavior are challenging. In particular, the geographic and depth distributions of migratory top predators ar
Abstract: Invasive species management can be the the subject of debate in many countries due to conflicting ecological, ethical, economic, and social reasons, especially when dealing with a species s
Abstract: Ocean acidification, the increase in seawater CO2 with all its associated consequences, is relatively well understood in open oceans. In shelf seas such as the Great Barrier Reef, processe
Abstract: The backdrop of legends and movies, the deep sea has always been unfathomable because we had no idea what existed there. Once thought to be barren of life, we now know this couldn’t be
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
James Cook University Townsville
Queensland 4811 Australia
Phone: 61 7 4781 4000
Email: info@coralcoe.org.au