Should this plant be declared one of the worst weeds in Australia? Without a national policy, the spread of smothering buffel grass will continue unchecked.

one of Australia's worst weeds and can safely said to be more damaging than cane toads theconversation.com/should-this-...

HomoTherm: An Open‐Source Approach to Modelling Heat Exchange in Humans and Other Hominins in Diverse Environments We present ‘HomoTherm’, a human heat budget model for simulating humans and related species with diverse traits in diverse environments. It is part of the NicheMapR package for biophysical modelling ...

You can now model human heat exchange in R (and via a Shiny app). I started work on this with Shane Maloney (Uni of WA) way back in 2014, with Duncan Mitchell (Uni of the Witwatersrand) joining us along the way onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... @globalchangebio.bsky.social @unimelb.edu.au

Let the Desert Breathe: Demand National Buffel Grass Action Across the heart of our continent, a dull straw-green tide is taking over. Buffel grass, Tjanpi kura (bad grass), Mama Tjunpi (devil grass) is transforming our deserts into dangerous monocultures that...

Help put pressure on the govt to fight the curse of buffel by declaring it a weed of national significance. Buffel is transforming our beautiful desert ecosystems through its dominance and alteration of fire regimes. It is arguably our worst invasive species invasives.org.au/how-to-help/...

Urgent: Help Pacific Villagers save their Leatherback Turtles The Pacific Leatherback turtle faces an imminent threat of extinction due to recent US policy cuts halting conservation efforts. These ocean giants have roamed the Pacific Ocean for over 100 million y...

Urgent: Help Pacific Villagers save their Leatherback Turtles chuffed.org/project/emer...

Can we keep our grass and control it too? Buffel grass is one of rangeland Australia’s most wicked and unresolved challenges – a plant that is valued in some areas and despised in others.

A must read if you care about the arid zone: cosmosmagazine.com/australia/bu...

You can choose from any of the ~6000 species with DEB parameters in the AmP collection www.bio.vu.nl/thb/deb/debl...

screen grab of the global ectotherm life history hindcaster

Here are some new Shiny apps that allow hindcasts of animal life histories using the microclimate, ectotherm and DEB models of NicheMapR:

bioforecasts.science.unimelb.edu.au/app_direct/e...
bioforecasts.science.unimelb.edu.au/app_direct/e...
bioforecasts.science.unimelb.edu.au/app_direct/e...

The front cover of a journal (Herpetofauna), featuring a brown and black snake (a Pygmy Python) on a red rock.

The front cover of a journal (Herpetofauna), featuring a brown gecko (a rainforest gecko) on a mossy rock.

New to BHL this week: more "Herpetofauna". Filled with observations, husbandry & traits data, this publication is hard to find both online & in libraries. We're hoping to have all volumes freely accessible on @biodivlibrary.bsky.social soon. #herpetology www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography...

📢 Big news from the Biodiversity Heritage Library: The Smithsonian will no longer host BHL’s central operations from Jan 2026. After 20 years, we’re entering a new chapter – seeking new funding and support to sustain our global staff and infrastructure. Please share. 🌱
#ILoveBHL #OpenAccess

Hi Bluesky, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest #OpenAccess digital library of biodiversity literature and archives. We're a global consortium of 660 contributors who've made 63 million pages of biodiversity knowledge freely accessible online. www.biodiversitylibrary.org

Buffel grass put on the Federal election agenda - Beef Central Farming groups and politicians have come together to put buffel grass on the agenda ahead of the Federal election, with the Labor Government expected to call an election in the coming days...Read More

But the pastoral industry loves it and thinks it deserves an Order of Australia www.beefcentral.com/news/buffel-.... If you love Central Australia, help pressure the Federal Government to declare it a national weed and invest in the development of biological controls.

The devil grass is not only an ecological disaster - it's a social one for the First Nations people of the arid zone, including the Anangu www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...

The light green in the middle ground is buffel, spreading across the flats and up onto the hills. It is spreading into this gorge and replacing the Triodia (spinifex)

It changes fire regimes to be more intense and burns the country to a monoculture. It is the light green in the photo, spreading up into the hills replacing Triodia. Efforts to control it by spraying or weeding are now like trying to hold back the tide and the only real hope is biological control.

I was with John Read who has watched it spread over the 25 years of regular visits. It's spreading by wind, humans, cars and mammals. It's killing river red gums, figs, mulga woodlands, and smothering flower-filled native grasslands and spinifex-covered sand dunes and plains.

This is a Len Beadell marker I photographed last weekend on the Gunbarrel Hwy in South Australia, surrounded by an ecological and social disaster called Buffel Grass. Anangu call it tjanpi mamu which means "devil grass" in Pitjantjatjara. It's steadily eroding the flora and fauna of our deserts.

Photo credit: Peter soltys. Image created by Nicholas Wu.

How vulnerable are #amphibians to extreme heat? 🐸🌡️

Our paper in @nature.com shows that many amphibians are already overheating, and many more species will be impacted by climate warming globally.

See the thread below for a digest 🧵

Link to the paper: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

#Nature

The Ecology and Evolution of Invasive Populations Abstract. Why do populations spread through space, and how do they change as they do so? In answering these questions, this book shows that phenomena as di

New book out on invasions by the brilliant @benflips.bsky.social academic.oup.com/book/59515

A great summary by @nicholaswu.bsky.social on a paper applying #NicheMapR to model climate change impacts on heat stress in frogs globally, led by @patricepottier.bsky.social. Note how different the +2 and +4 warming scenarios. Climate warming impacts on biology are very nonlinear. #UniMelb #ARC

I’ll take these mating grasshoppers back to the Uni of Melbourne where we will raise their offspring to see what their problem is!

The parthenogenetic species meets the sexual ones (from which it evolved by hybridisation) on the outskirts of Kalgoorlie where this hybrid mating happens naturally. They form “hybrid zones” where triploid offspring have very low fitness meaning they can’t coexist.

I’ve collected males from nearby sexual populations and set them up with the parthenogenetic females (who haven’t had sex for a couple of hundred thousand years). What should happen is that the males’ sperm fertilises the cloned eggs so that their offspring will have three sets of chromosomes.

I’m in the Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie where I’ve set up a makeshift grasshopper brothel in a cabin at a caravan park. In this historically male-dominate town of humans one of the grasshoppers - Warramaba virgo - is all female …

DEB theory is on bluesky

Climate change and the cost-of-living squeeze in desert lizards Climate warming can induce a cost-of-living “squeeze” in ectotherms by increasing energetic expenditures while reducing foraging gains. We used biophysical models (validated by 2685 field observations...

The late Eric Pianka made thousands of observations of desert lizard body temperature and activity. We used them to test biophysical models of their cost of living and projected the models to past and future climates in Africa and Australia #unimelb #ARC @science.org
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Details : Research Fellow in Mammalian Movement Ecology and Energetics : The University of Melbourne Careers at The University of Melbourne

Please circulate: Postdoc position on responses of Australian mammal pests to climate change. Part of my ARC Laureate Fellowship research. Lots of hands-on fieldwork. Learn about biophysical models. Remote locations. Collaboration with #EcologicalHorizons and #AWC jobs.unimelb.edu.au/en/job/91880...

A sunrise above the mallee. Trees and scrub on red sand. Two people walking through the bush.

A scene of mallee scrub, trees, small shrubs and red sand.

This week I assisted with the annual pitfall trapping at Secret Rocks on the Eyre Peninsula. This beautiful place is a living arc for so many species of endangered wildlife, including Numbats, Malleefowl, Red-tailed Phascogales and the Sandhill Dunnart. 1/2

📖Published📖

Our latest review article presents 10 practical guidelines for ground-based research of terrestrial microclimates, covering methods and best practices from initial conceptualisation of the study to data analyses 🌎 🧪 Read more here 👇

https://buff.ly/41BKn8o

RIP Michael Leunig. Thank you for your reflections on our lives. Your mirror was whimsical, beautiful, wise & sometimes very uncomfortable. You made us love ducks, gaze at clouds & look deep within ourselves. www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12...

Can you add me please Dan?

I like the last paper I published- In it collaborators and I test a classic hypothesis in ecology for the first time (that we are aware of) in plants.

The take-home message is plants that like temperature variability may “win” in future climates.
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....