Quantitative & Applied Ecology Group

Come and visit CEED and QAEG to do collaborative research! We have another round of applications for CEED’s visiting fellowships for overseas early career researchers. The travel scheme is designed to enable PhD and postdoctoral researchers from outside Australia to spend 3 – 6 months visiting two or more of the four CEED hubs: ANU, UMelb/RMIT, UQ, UWA. Early Career Researchers are those with no more than five years full time equivalent research experience since the completion of PhD excluding extended periods of unemployment or leave. Applications will be assessed on three criteria: quality of the applicant, collaborative relationship with CEED and quality of the proposed project.

Please contact us if you would like to visit.

To apply, complete the application form here.

A recent article in The University of Melbourne’s publicity magazine, The Voice, featured an article about adaptive management of malleefowl. This is a research project being run by QAecologists Michael Bode, Libby Rumpff and Brendan Wintle, collaborating with the malleefowl managers. It is funded by the Australian Research Council through the Linkage Grant program

Malleefowl have declined throughout most of their range. The factors that drive that decline and how best to recover the species are unclear. The influence of fire, weather, clearing of vegetation, and threats from introduced predators (cats and foxes) are implicated, but the evidence about the relative influence of these factors on changes in abundance are unclear.

Research can help to resolve some of this uncertainty, but when is the money best spent on research rather than spending that money on management? Adaptive management aims to help balance the trade-off that is implicit in that question.

This particular project aims to implement an adaptive management program to help determine optimal combinations of management and monitoring for improving the conservation status of malleefowl. It is a good example of how QAecologists aim to help managers of biodiversity make better management decisions in the face of uncertainty.