This term we have a wide range of seminars for staff and students from the School of Anthropology and Conservation. Details of all seminars can be found here.
Amongst the opportunities on offer during week 1 is a lunchtime seminar from April Reside. The seminar is at 1pm, Thursday 29th September in the Swingland Room.
April works for the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change, James Cook University and CSIRO, Townsville, Australia! Her seminar is titled:
Assessing climate change vulnerability: using novel methods for predicting impacts on Australian birds.
This is what April says about her seminar …
Tropical species are predicted to be severely impacted by climate change, and tropical lowlands projected to experience steep declines in species richness. Predictions for species distributions in tropical rainforests worldwide show dramatic declines for many endemic vertebrate species, including many extinctions. However, few studies have investigated the climate change impacts of tropical savanna biomes, many of which are likely to face the predicted “tropical lowland biotic attrition”. The vast majority of tropical Australia exists as savanna, and to date little work has been done to assess the vulnerability of Australian tropical savanna fauna to climate change. To address this gap, I undertook a comprehensive assessment of the climate change vulnerability of birds in Australian tropical savanna. The highly mobile nature of birds in Australian tropical savanna requires that standard methods be adapted to account for this mobility. I used spatial modelling to predict the impact of changes in fire and climate on bird distributions, and then incorporated these predictions into an overall vulnerability analysis. I show how spatial modelling can be adapted to be relevant to highly mobile species, and can be used to identify the vulnerable elements of the faunal assemblages and aid prioritising conservation action.