CSIRO Honourary Fellow Addresses Australia's Ecological Problems. (November 10, 2005)

    The Nov/Dec 2005 issue of Australasian Science features a hard hitting contribution, Large-Scale Experiments Needed to Save Australia’s Biota, by Charles Krebs, retired Professor of Zoology from the University of British Columbia and Honorary Fellow at CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, .

Currently, matters continue to "muddle along" and there is little time left to put them right.

And that in turn will require critical research -- just making educated guesses is not only  insufficient, it is tantamount to dereliction.

Professor Kerbs makes the following points:

We can be successful in addressing ecological problems and their social dimensions, but only if we rely on strong science. However, we do not currently have all the ecological information needed to guide fruitful actions in natural resource management.

 

We cannot import ecological knowledge for Australia from the Northern Hemisphere like we import medical knowledge. Only our universities, states, Cooperative Research Centres and the CSIRO have the potential to conduct research in natural resource management.

 

CSIRO should be conducting the long-term, large-scale research needed to complete coverage of resource management problems that involve both the public and the private good. But CSIRO is not currently doing the field research needed to achieve the goal of biodiverse, healthy ecosystems for Australia. Its shift to computer models is a shortcut that does not meet these challenges because models are useful only with reliable fundamental knowledge.

 

We cannot afford to muddle along. We must use our limited resources to the most pressing problems on time and spatial scales to give answers that we can obtain only with our best scientists applying the finest experimental methods.