The latest round of ARC funding has been announced and we would like to congratulate those qaeco members who were successful in their applications:
Brendan Wintle & Pia Lentini received funding on their Discovery Project predicting the ecological and economic impacts of trade. They will be working alongside their CEBRA colleagues Mark Burgman & Tom Kompas, CSIRO scientist Dr. Brett Bryan, & Professor Joshua Lawler at the University of Washington, as well as a number of postdocs & PhD students. This project “aims to understand and predict the effects of global trade on land use and biodiversity. Growth in international trade increases trade-mediated land-use by increasing demand for commodities directly or indirectly derived from the land. Accurate predictions of trade effects and opportunities would allow governments to maximise ecological and economic benefits and minimise effects through judicious planning and regulation, but such analyses do not exist. This project expects to advance trade policy evaluation by improving and integrating computable global equilibrium models and land-use and ecological models to better characterise consequences of trade.”
Reid Tingley was awarded a DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) to conduct research into incorporating developmental plasticity into models of species distributions. His project “aims to develop a generalizable framework for predicting effects of environmental variability on organisms’ developmental strategies, using anuran tadpoles as a test case. This framework will reveal how environmental variability influences geographic variation in developmental strategies, and provide tools to account for that variation in mechanistic models of species distributions. These tools are expected to increase the capacity to predict extinction risk in changing environments, and be amenable to any taxon or environment, providing a solid foundation for understanding the evolution of life-history strategies in variable environments.”
Well done! And those that missed out this time – you’ll get ’em next round!
