Prof Graham Edgar
Our understanding of ecosystem processes is framed by conventional wisdom, which unfortunately often turns out to be wrong. This is particularly the case for marine ecosystems where our study species live out of sight, leading to poorly trained conceptual and analytical models. In an era of changing climate and excessive fishing pressure, efficacy of different management interventions need rigorous assessment, regardless that public attention and politically motivated resources tend to be directed towards short-term press events, while chronic impacts are overlooked. Examples of inefficient management include marine protected areas, fishery stock depletion, heatwave impacts, oil spills, and threatened species prioritisation. Generalised insights, including contributions of environmental and social covariates, require ecological data encompassing national and global scales. Critically, cost-effective monitoring of shallow-water species is possible worldwide by applying new methodologies. These include accessing the enthusiasm and skills of citizen scientists trained in advanced scientific methods, and broad-scale application of eDNA and remote sensing. Results from the Reef Life Survey program tracking decadal population trends for 1030 species at 1600 sites around the Australian continent over a decade are described.
Presentation Slides – Edgar Graham
Biography:
Professor Graham Edgar is a Senior Marine Ecologist at the University of Tasmania and has a career history that includes periods as Director of Marine Research at the Charles Darwin Research Station (Galapagos Islands), Senior Fulbright Fellow in Washington (USA), and JSPS Fellow in Amakusa (Japan). His marine conservation studies are particularly focused on the role of marine reserves for safeguarding biodiversity and fisheries. Graham leads collaborative field studies with management agencies extending over 30 years to assess changing densities of fishes, invertebrates and macro-algae inside and outside marine reserves across Australia. He investigates numerous environmental threats additional to fishing that include climate change, fish farms, nutrification, and introduced species, and has studied species’ interactions in kelp, seagrass, rocky reef and soft sediment ecosystems. Graham’s research demonstrates that marine studies of broad scientific and management importance can be conducted for thousands of species at a global scale at low cost. He has been awarded Australia’s most prestigious awards for both environmental science (Eureka Prize) and marine science (AMSA Silver Jubilee Award), and the international Carlo Heip Award for Marine Biodiversity Science.
