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Welcome to issue 175 of Feral Flyer.
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Participant’s Committee meeting and AGM
The IA CRC’s 2010 Participant’s Committee meeting and Annual General Meeting (AGM) were held on Wednesday 13 October. Chair of the Participant’s Committee, Dr Jim Thompson, opened the meeting to representatives from a wide range of member research providers, commercialisers and end-user groups.
IA CRC Chair, Helen Cathles, opened the AGM and commended the CRC for its strong track record highlighted at the full program review held in June 2010, and need to leverage off this to achieve a successful five year extension bid. Her address is available at the link below. This was followed by a presentation from Susan Duson, IA CRC Business Manager, who presented the financial report that highlighted that the CRC was in excellent financial shape and indeed was on the way to significantly exceeding its cash investment in CRC research and development.
Chief Executive Andreas Glanznig then gave an overview of the IA CRC’s strategic performance from the past year. His presentation focused on the suite of outputs delivered last financial year, and highlighted the strong path to adoption strategies that has led to good early uptake of many of them. This was followed by presentations by the CRC’s Program Leaders, followed by a special presentation on the IA CRC’s adoption strategy and an outline of the PestSmart information toolkits.
The afternoon session focused on discussing the future of pest animal control in Australia and examined the IA CRC’s draft extension bid prospectus (the IACRC will rebid in the next CRC Program Round). Importantly, the meeting decided to establish a Participants’ Reference Group to assist the Board and Executive Committee in progressing the bid, and nominations will be called for in the next two weeks.
The meeting looked beyond the immediate rebid toward a sustainable future, and discussed the possible preferred shapes of an invasive animals R&D body in 2020 and how it nests into the Australian Biosecurity System. It was decided that a discussion paper would be distributed soon inviting comment on options for a invasive animals R&D institution, and that these would feed into the Board’s review process.
Jim Thompson, Participants Committee meeting chair concluded that it is a critical time for the IA CRC, and that it needed to position itself and invasive animals research to ensure that the collaborative research that has yielded so much in this CRC prospers into the long term and has a permanent home.
Links:
2010 Research summary now available
The Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre’s 2010 Research Portfolio Summary is now available to download. The Research Portfolio Summary provides information on the full suite of research activities and includes completed, current and future projects.
[ Click here ] to download the document [pdf 5Mb].
Deadly Drivers of Change: Invasive Species and Climate Change Report
Separately, climate change and invasive species are two of the greatest threats to biodiversity and the ecosystem services upon which humanity relies. Combined their impacts will be compounded, potentially resulting in negative feedback loops with increasingly dire consequences. The latest publication from GISP* by Stas Burgiel & Adrianna Muir highlights recent efforts to identify the underlying dynamics linking these two global change drivers and the optimal responses for the policy-making and research communities.
The three key messages that can be distilled from this report are:
1. Climate change will have direct and second order impacts that facilitate the introduction, establishment and/or spread of invasive species.
2. Invasive species can increase the vulnerability of ecosystems to other climate-related stressors and also reduce their potential to sequester greenhouse gasses.
3. Using an ecosystem-based adaptation approach, these pressures on ecosystems and their ability to provide important services can be offset by preventing the introduction of new invasive species and by eradicating or controlling those damaging species already present.
The report can be downloaded at: http://www.gisp.org/whatsnew/docs/Climate_Change_ReportA4.pdf
Pets, Aquarium and Terrarium species publication
A new report in their Technical series is now available from the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Pets, Aquarium, and Terrarium Species: Best Practices for Addressing Risks to Biodiversity provides “a resource to those Parties or Governments who wish to establish their own import/export control mechanisms to determine how they may effectively and efficiently evaluate the risks posed by the potential import/export of live animals and plants as pets, aquarium and terrariums species as well as mechanisms to control these imports or exports if the risk level warrants such control”.
This colorful and useful report is largely based on an expert workshop held in 2008 at the University of Notre Dame, but the CBD report includes much additional information beyond what was covered in that workshop.
- Link: Download report
New Publications
Scientific paper
Andrew J. Bengsen, Luke K.-P. Leung, Steven J. Lapidge, Iain J. Gordon. (2010). Artificial illumination reduces bait-take by small rainforest mammals. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 127(1): 66-72.
Dingo book
Brad Purcell (2010). Dingo. Australian Natural History Series, CSIRO Publishing.
“Many present-day Australians see the dingo as a threat and a pest to human production systems. An alternative viewpoint, which is more in tune with Indigenous culture, allows others to see the dingo as a means to improve human civilisation. The dingo has thus become trapped between the status of pest animal and totemic creature. This book helps readers to recognise this dichotomy, as a deeper understanding of dingo behaviour is now possible through new technologies which have made it easier to monitor their daily lives.”
Media round-up
Kristy Hinze and Women’s Weekly help showcase AWC’s work
In her role as Patron and Ambassador for AWC, Kristy Hinze recently visited Pungalina Wildlife Sanctuary to see first-hand some of the challenges in managing and protecting such a large, remote property. More
Dingo fight: call to fund eradication and bounty system
INCREASED dingo numbers south of the dog fence are wreaking havoc on pastoral sheep enterprises and posing a threat to bordering farm land. State Liberal member for Stuart Dan van Holst Pellekaan is calling on the South Australian Government to fund dingo eradication below the fence and the reintroduction of a bounty system available only to pastoralists to help control numbers. More
New device to poison dogs and foxes
Landholders battling wild dogs and foxes could soon have access to another tool, designed to revolutionise control methods. More
Wild dogs breeding out of control south of the dog fence
DINGO numbers are out of control south of the famed dog fence, killing thousands of sheep and threatening the livelihoods of graziers across South Australia. More
Fox Taskforce defends response
The head of Tasmania’s fox eradication program has defended its response to reported fox sightings. More
IA CRC in the news
A selection of current media articles directly related to the IA CRC is available here. You can subscribe to receive updates directly to your email inbox or mobile phone, or save as a favourite page in your web browser and view at your convenience. This feed can also be provided to third parties without the risk of copyright breach.
Upcoming conferences
For more information on these and other events, please see details on our website.
2010
- Australasian Wildlife Management Society Symposium. Sydney, Australia. 20-21 October.
- Australasian Wildlife Management Society 2010 Conference. Torquay, Victoria. 1-3 December.
- Ecological Society of Australia 2010 Annual Conference. Australian National University, Canberra, 6-10 December.
- International Chemical Congress of Pacific Basin Societies. Honolulu, Hawaii, 15-20 December.
2011
- 2nd International Invasive Birds Conference. Cape Town, South Africa, 7-9 March 2011.
- 15th Australasian Vertebrate Pest Conference. Sydney, Australia, 20-23 June 2011.
- Biolief: Biological Invasions and Ecosystem Functioning. Mar del Plata, Argentina, 21-24 November 2011.
- International Congress for Conservation Biology. Christchurch, New Zealand 29 November-2 December.
