Personal connections key to climate adaptation
Connections with friends and family are key to helping communities adapt to the devastating impact of climate change on their homes and livelihoods, a new study shows. The research found people are
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
Maria completed her Ph.D. in 2006 on neutral theory and biodiversity patterns of reef corals, under the supervision of Sean Connolly and Terry Hughes. She moved to Scotland to take up her first postdoctoral fellowship in Anne Magurran’s lab at the University of St Andrews. Maria came back to Australia to join the ARC CoE of Coral Reef Studies last February.
Species abundance distributions summarize the patterns of species rarity and commonness in ecological communities, and are the biodiversity pattern most often used to test biodiversity models. However, the abundances of rare species require large samples to be confidently estimated. In this seminar I will present the species abundance distribution for a sample of >40,000 coral colonies from a single bay in Lizard Island. This exceeds existing samples of coral assemblages by over an order of magnitude. Although species abundance distributions are widely accepted to follow a lognormal distribution, these data have a multimodal distribution, and are best fitted by a mixture of three lognormal distributions. Several types of heterogeneities within the community are explored, but only differences among species spatial distributions are linked to multimodality.
Connections with friends and family are key to helping communities adapt to the devastating impact of climate change on their homes and livelihoods, a new study shows. The research found people are
A massive global study of the world’s reefs has found sharks are ‘functionally extinct’ on nearly one in five of the reefs surveyed. James Cook University’s Professor Colin Simpfendorfer wa
A study published today found national governments repeatedly resisted the placement of 41 UNESCO World Heritage sites—including the Great Barrier Reef—on the World Heritage in Danger list. This r
Scientists can now explain how baby reef sharks tolerate living in the sometimes-extreme environments of their nurseries—but, they also say these habitats face an uncertain future which may leave ne
Abstract: Transformative environmental policy reform at a system-wide scale has received minimal attention as an academic research focus. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Zoning Plan 2003, release
Abstract: Anyone trying to communicate about sustainability quickly runs into difficulties. The most common definition, “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the
Abstract: Coral reefs are dynamic and complex systems, and hence have ability teach us about fundamental principles of community ecology. One long-standing interest is learning how ecological communi
Abstract: Global heating will affect ecosystems and the benefits that they provide to people in a wide variety of ways, with profound direct and indirect effects on human society. Microeconomic adapt
Abstract: Most of the world’s population live within 100km of a coastline and depend on coastal marine ecosystems for sustenance, shoreline protection, and economic resources. Because our shoreline
Abstract: Urbanization deeply alters ecosystems, livelihoods, lifestyle, and consequently, human-nature relationships, with significant consequences for health and environmental behaviour. However, t
Abstract: Overexploitation from direct fishing and bycatch devastated shark populations around the world, leaving considerable doubt as to their ecological status. Yet much of what is known about sta
Abstract: Early life history stages of marine organisms can be difficult to study in the field, in part due to their inherently small size. Understanding to what extent early post-settlement processe
Partner Research Institutions
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