Politely referred to as ‘non-charismatic’ or ‘unloved’ species, some threatened species are at an even greater risk of extinction because they’re not valued.
The NESP Threatened Species Recovery Hub is offering top-up funding for a current PhD student to research the role of communications in building community
buy-in and support for ‘non-charismatic species,’ as part of Project 6.3.
Potential topics include: ‘Increasing support for non-charismatic species: How to get the unloved loved?’, and ‘Understanding attitudes towards the role of fire and threatened species control in threatened species management’,
however students will be encouraged to propose other topics within that broader scope.
Students must have their own PhD stipend or scholarship. The annual $7,000 top-up will be offered for three years to augment their PhD stipend.
Applications for RMIT’s mid-year PhD scholarships close on Monday 2 May, 2016.
Please contact Georgia Garrard: georgia.garrard@rmit.edu.au or +61 3 9925 9986.
For more information, click here.
Many landscapes in Australia are fire-prone, and increasingly so. Altered fire regimes can have a serious negative impact on threatened plant species and ecological communities. A Threatened Species Recovery Hub project is working to better understand the effects of different fire regimes on threatened flora in order to improve fire management strategies and conservation outcomes.
Almost a quarter of Australia’s possums and gliders are listed as threatened under Australian environmental law, and many more are showing signs of decline. Dr Rochelle Steven from The University of Queensland believes people in the community can do a lot to support conservation, especially in urban areas.
The detection and monitoring of threatened species have been a strong area of research in the National Environmental Science Program and also the two national environmental research programs which preceded it. Hub Director Professor Brendan Wintle takes a look at what we’ve been achieving and why it is so important to the conservation of Australia’s threatened species.
In 2009, the Christmas Island blue-tailed skink and Lister’s gecko were headed for imminent extinction. Parks Australia acted quickly to collect remaining wild individuals in order to establish captive breeding programs on Christmas Island and at Taronga Zoo, Sydney, which have been highly successful. A Threatened Species Recovery Hub project team is working closely with Parks Australia to help secure a future for the two lizards beyond captivity.
The silver-headed antechinus and black-tailed dusky antechinus are carnivorous marsupials found in high-elevation forests in parts of central-eastern and south-eastern Queensland. They were only described in the past six years, but they are already listed as Endangered. Knowing where they occur is essential for effective conservation, but current distribution knowledge is patchy. To address this, PhD candidate Stephane Batista in partnership with the Queensland Herbarium and Queensland Department of Environment and Science is modelling the habitat where these threatened species are likely to occur, and is using detection dogs to rapidly survey these sites.