Category: News

The Bargaining Table

Science Sunday! My first since the death of Google Reader. Let’s dive straight in.

Viet Le, the scientific amasian, has a nice piece on genetically modified crops. Perhaps the time has come to have another debate on the issue of GMOs, too often dismissed out of hand.

An “Acceptable

A day at the museum has come to life. Our latest robots are roaming the galleries of the National Museum of Australia. They’re using high speed broadband to allow remote visitors to control their own view of museum exhibits while interacting with a museum educator.

The stars of Museum Robot project, B1 and B2, will use telepresence technology to roam the galleries of the National Museum of Australia. Using high speed broadband, the robots will allow remote visitors to control their own view of museum exhibits while interacting with a museum educator.

“The Museum Robot is a fantastic initiative and a perfect example of some of the applications made possible by the NBN. This kind of rich and interactive experience, nationally accessible, depends on the type of synchronous communication made possible by high speed broadband,

An initiative that will help Australia harness cutting-edge advances in biological sciences to inform better environmental management decision making will be announced on Wednesday 3 April at the official launch of the Centre for Biodiversity Analysis, Canberra.

The Centre is a joint initiative established in partnership with CSIRO and the Australian National University (ANU).

“The Centre is drawing on CSIRO and ANU’s world class expertise, and harnessing new and emerging technologies in biodiversity science to improve our knowledge of Australia’s biodiversity and enable governments and conservation NGOs to translate policy into meaningful actions,” said Professor Craig Moritz, Director of the Centre for Biodiversity Analysis.

“It’s estimated that Australia is home to over half a million unique living species, many of which are found nowhere else on Earth, but of these only about one third are known to science.”

“Improved knowledge of Australia’s biodiversity – how many species, where they are, and how they evolve across environments and through time – will be especially important to ensure sustainable development and production, to maximize ecosystem benefits, and to protect our unique diversity in the face of rapid environmental change,” he said.

CSIRO and ANU have joined forces to address this challenge.

“The Centre will promote collaborative biodiversity science by hosting conferences and workshops, forming ANU-CSIRO working groups, supporting collaborative projects, connecting students and researchers with managers and policy makers, and facilitating the collation and connection of biodiversity information in the ANU-CSIRO Canberra Precinct,” said Professor Moritz.

The Centre also provides an early example of the value of the developing Canberra Global Research Precinct, which will focus on plant and environmental sciences. Like the Centre, the Precinct will be built on CSIRO-ANU collaboration, and will utilise its location in the national capital to promote the uptake of research outputs by government agencies.

The launch will also mark the opening of the Centre’s inaugural conference which brings together Australian and international biodiversity scientists to discuss recent advances in biodiversity genomics.

“Genomics is an exciting and rapidly expanding field that has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of environmental assessments and monitoring, and the speed at which new species can be identified,” said Professor Moritz.

“It is also providing important new insights into the ability of species to adapt to climate change.”

Media are invited to attend the launch and associated conference.

Scientists from CSIRO and the University of Western Australia have teamed up with Kimberley Traditional Owners to test a new molecular technique that has the potential to revolutionise the discovery of new species, particularly those living in remote and poorly studied parts of the world.

Working in the virtually inaccessible rainforest vine thickets of Australia’s National Heritage-listed Kimberley region, the team are using a technique known as ‘ecogenomics’ to survey the area’s insect biodiversity, and rapidly describe what are expected to be hundreds of unique and rare species. The technique involves identifying species based on their DNA and morphology, and is much faster and more cost effective than traditional taxonomic approaches.

“Using ecogenomics, we will be able to understand what is there and how unique it is in months rather than decades,” said CSIRO’s Dr Owain Edwards, the project leader.

“Faster ways of surveying biodiversity are essential if we are going to effectively manage the world’s unique ecosystems.”

The remote and hard to access nature of the rainforest pockets of northwest Kimberley, as well as their isolation from each other, mean that the insect life there is some of the least known on the planet and is likely to be highly endemic (which means unique to that area). This provided the ideal location for the team to put ecogenomics to the test.

“Over the coming months we’ll be analysing the DNA of about 300 000 insect specimens collected from 36 isolated rainforest pockets across the Kimberley and screening them for the presence of endemic species,” said Professor Raphael Didham, an invertebrate expert that holds a joint position with CSIRO and the University of Western Australia.

“We’re hoping to find hundreds of new species. It’s pretty exciting work.”

The technique also has the potential to improve the efficiency of environmental impact assessments and conservation management.

“The speed and accuracy at which we’ll be able to assess a given site, even a really remote one, will greatly improve the efficiency of evaluating possible biodiversity impacts,” said Dr Edwards.

The scientists and Indigenous rangers from the Wunambal Gaambera and Dambimangari Aboriginal Corporations carried out the wet-season insect surveys over a one month period in January, at a time when the Kimberley is in its active growing season.

The team clocked up over 7000 kilometres in a helicopter accessing the isolated rainforest pockets across a 21 000 square kilometre region of the northwest Kimberley.

On-the-ground training provided to rangers as part of the project will mean insect sampling activities can continue in the Kimberley in the future.

The research is supported by the Science and Industry Endowment Fund.

Source, and image: Approaching Mt Trafalgar, northwest Kimberley. The team surveyed the rainforest patch visible (dark green) in the lower left corner of the photo: http://www.csiro.au/en/Portals/Media/DNA-technology-set-to-speed-up-species-discovery.aspx

Welcome to some of this week’s best science happenings on the interweb space!

The first question is simple: can you name a female statistician? Epidemiologista answers its own question with a nice profile of Dr Janet Lane-Claypon: epidemiologic pioneer.

Can you name a female statistician?

“We read about statistics every day: be it the predicted winner of a football league, the association between the weather and mortality, or a newly discovered link between an inanimate object and cancer. Statistics are everywhere. And perhaps even more so this year, as 2013 has been hailed as the International Year of Statistics. Despite all this attention for numbers, we generally don’t know a lot about the people hiding behind their computers churning them out. With media attention for people like Nate Silver and Hans Rosling, some are now able to name at least one statistician, but, stepping it up a level, could you name a female statistician?

CSIRO researchers are studying the Torres Strait tropical rock lobster fishery to develop a scientific approach to integrate cultural factors into natural resource management.

“Fisheries management traditionally involves balancing commercial gain and sustainability, but for Indigenous communities cultural and lifestyle factors can be just as important and these factors are more difficult to measure,” says Dr Eva Plaganyi of CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Flagship.

“Globally, small-scale fisheries employ around 38 million people and it’s important to look at the impact of natural resource management practices on their livelihood,” she says.

The Torres Strait tropical rock lobster fishery has many stakeholders, including non-Indigenous commercial fishers and Indigenous fishers who fish for reasons ranging from subsistence to commercial. The social objectives of the fishery are spelled out in a treaty between Australia and Papua New Guinea that acknowledges and protects the traditional fishing practices of Indigenous people.

“Often research into fisheries management has focused on commercial businesses and overlooked the unique characteristics of Indigenous fishers. We wanted focus on economic needs as well as socio-cultural rights and values,” says Dr Plaganyi.

The multidisciplinary team of researchers brought together a range of sophisticated methods, from mathematics and modelling to social science interviews. Their results allow managers to understand the potential trade-offs when making a management decision that affects not only a resource but also the people who depend on it.

“Market-based management options might score highly in a capitalistic society, but we found that two key social indicators, namely equity and a sense of self-determination, underpin successful management,” says Dr Plaganyi.

“Indigenous communities have aspirations and cultural considerations that are simultaneously unique and important, and their communities are often communalistic rather than being driven solely by economic considerations. We have developed an objective scientific approach that reflects this and can be applied to natural resource management beyond fisheries,” she says.

The research described here is underpinned by extensive consultations with Indigenous fishers, as well as other sectors and managers. It builds on a long history of involvement in the Torres Strait, with CSIRO divers planning the 25th annual lobster survey this year.

This research was funded by Australian Fisheries Management Authority and CSIRO.

‘Integrating Indigenous Livelihood and Lifestyle Objectives in Managing a Natural Resource’will be published this week in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Image: Panulirus ornatus, the tropical rock lobster.

Source.