New Fellows Seminar
Wednesday, 7 May 2008

The role and importance of large-scale experiments and natural experiments in ecological discovery
by Professor David Lindenmayer

David Lindenmayer has broad interests in conservation biology, wildlife ecology, landscape ecology and habitat fragmentation. David has established six large-scale, long-term studies and ‘natural experiments’ in south-eastern Australia spanning research on native forests, plantations, woodlands and heathlands. His interest is the quantification of factors governing the distribution, abundance and population dynamics of vertebrate populations in natural and disturbed landscapes, particularly those subject to forestry practices and landscape fragmentation. He has written 20 books and over 285 peer-reviewed scientific articles, primarily based on extensive empirical data gathered from these large-scale investigations.

Galileo believed it was critical to ‘measure what was measureable and make measureable what cannot be measured’. This is important for understanding the ecology of environments and the biota they support. It is even more important when decisions are made about the use and management of natural resources. The approach we have taken over the past 25 years has been to establish six large-scale, long-term ecological experiments and natural experiments to make the measurements needed to better understand the impacts of resource use on environments (particularly biodiversity) and develop new strategies to mitigate such impacts. In this talk I will present two exciting discoveries from the research. The first is on a rare species of heathland bird from a major fire experiment at Jervis Bay on the south coast of New South Wales. The second is on the recovery of small mammal populations from small habitat patches following a removal experiment near Tumut, west of Canberra. The insights from these empirical studies frequently have major implications for resource management.