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Ecology in Arid Australia –
A Personal Perspective
Steve Morton
CSIRO
Melbourne
Three substantial trends and seven particular scientists stand out when I reflect upon the past 50 years of ecology in arid Australia. Undoubtedly my selection of themes and people is idiosyncratic – and inclined towards animal ecology – but so it must inevitably be in a personal perspective. One of the three trends is solely scientific; another is only partly so; and the third is organisational.
Trend number one revolves around vast scale. Arid Australia is way too big relative to the number of scientists, or to numbers of all human beings for that matter, to allow you to feel as if you’re in any meaningful comfort zone when you throw down a quadrat, install a line of pit-traps, or set up an experiment. The horizon shimmers and beckons; through the mirage the far-off country unfolds in subtle variation over distances of a thousand kilometres and more. How to generalise understanding under these conditions, especially if the purpose of research is to provide solutions to applied problems? One of the most significant responses of Australian desert ecologists has been to work largely at the scale of the landscape.
The response was evident from the beginning of our period. CSIRO’s Land Research and Regional Survey Section was established in 1950 under Chris Christian’s leadership (see Robin 2007). Members of the Section explored and mapped recurring patterns of geomorphology, soils and vegetation over immense areas of the inland and the north. On my arrival at CSIRO in Alice Springs in 1984 I came to know well Ray Perry’s (1962) “General Report on Lands of the Alice Springs Area”, and rapidly fell into the habit when traveling of thinking about where I was among these great landscape gradients. Similarly, many Australian ecologists, through work on topics varying from resource flows (Ludwig et al. 2005), invertebrate ecology (Gregg et al. 2001), vertebrate ecology (Newsome 1975; Newsome and Corbett 1975; Wyndham 1983; Caughley et al. 1987; Roshier et al., 2001; Haythornthwaite and Dickman 2006), fire (Allan and Southgate 2002) and natural resource management (Morton et al. 1995; Stafford Smith and McAllister 2008), have taken landscape-scale science to the world.
The second trend is growing recognition of Indigenous ecological knowledge, a topic absent from almost all commentary 50 years ago. It has been stimulated partly out of a fascination with the depth of understanding possessed by Aboriginal people (Latz 1995), and partly by wider currents in Australian affairs leading to demands for more effective involvement of Indigenous people in management of their own affairs. Indigenous people want to live in the deserts to a far greater degree than other Australians and, consequently, they comprise the obvious workforce for activities that are culturally meaningful to them, such as conservation management (Morton 2008). The ‘desert knowledge’ movement is a further reflection of this trend (Stafford Smith and Cribb 2009).
Trend three encompasses the scientific infrastructure and institutions of arid zone ecology. Unlike the other two, this trend is one of stasis instead of growth. Few institutions focus on ecological research into arid Australia, if one leaves aside the pastoral science facilities of inland Queensland and New South Wales. Only two substantial combinations of laboratories exist: in Alice Springs, where CSIRO’s Laboratory and the Northern Territory’s Parks and Wildlife Unit are located; and the Fowlers Gap Field Station of the University of New South Wales, north of Broken Hill. The socio-economic system of inland Australia exhibits a ‘desert syndrome’ of intermittent links from outside rather than long-standing and coherent internal drivers (Stafford Smith 2008), and this reality dominates ecological science just as it does most other domains. Consequently, there are few resident scientists and the majority of work is still conducted by visitors.
In describing these trends I have already made reference to the people who, in my view, have contributed substantially to the development of ecology in arid Australia. Early in my career I had the privilege of meeting both Chris Christian and Ray Perry, although not the opportunity to know them well. My own work-life has involved lengthy periods of striving to marshal the financial and human resources without which science simply does not get done. As a result I have a particular appreciation not only of the contributions to knowledge made by these two men in the relative scientific vacuum of their time, but also of the organisational leadership that they exercised in CSIRO.
In 1972 I began PhD studies at the University of Melbourne, on one of the ubiquitous dasyurid marsupials of arid Australia, Sminthopsis. I read avidly, looking for scientific clues into the mystery and majesty of the inland. Two papers by Alan Newsome, both published in 1975, bowled me over. Unlike many, this author appeared to revel in the distances and the space, seemed to delight in the shifting ecological pattern and process evident as one moved for hundreds of kilometres across the country. He demonstrated that it was indeed possible to tackle vast scale with energy and imagination. Newsome also obviously loved to tell a story, for each of the two papers was characterised by elliptical diversions and inventive use of words. Alan was an examiner of my thesis, and when I finally achieved my ambition of joining CSIRO he wrote me a treasured letter of welcome. I found that his conversation was just like his writing, peppered with anecdotes and characteristic salty phrases (“It was as hot as a bastard!”). Alan might have skated across scientific detail sometimes (as have I), yet for me he was a torch-bearer.
Pretty well the first person I met while carrying my boxes of gear into the ZoologyBuilding at the University of Sydney was Graeme Caughley. As a new Postdoctoral Fellow I was anxious for skilled advice, and in his outwardly spiky and argumentative manner – while inwardly being rather diffident and frequently kind – Graeme gave me much of that, both then and several years later when we became colleagues once more in CSIRO. Far more importantly, he provided to Australian ecology in the 1980s a body of work on the spatial and temporal nature of population dynamics in kangaroos that was of outstanding international scientific prominence and of great significance in natural resource management. Graeme’s premature death in 1994 deprived our country of one of its brightest ecological stars.
Chris Dickman’s contributions to the ecology of Australian deserts are impossible to exaggerate. Together with his students, and especially his colleague in plant ecology, Glenda Wardle, Chris has extended our understanding of the landscape-scale effects of rain, fire and predation on the dynamics of organisms in the immense dune-fields of the eastern Simpson Desert. Chris does not rely heavily on any particular organisational infrastructure; the University of Sydney, Bush Heritage Australia and the Australian Research Council are highly supportive, but nevertheless Chris and his team choose to do their work, regardless of heat, cold and bush-flies, in the shade of a gidgee. I find the results of this 20-year long effort exhilarating.
I have limited space remaining, and yet am highly conscious of the wonderful contributors who are thereby left out (such as Richard Kingsford and his extraordinary work on inland waterbirds, Mark Westoby for his laser-like insights, and Russ Sinclair for his stewardship of the T.G.B. Osborn Reserve at Koonamore). However, I want to finish with two friends who welcomed me to Alice Springs more than 25 years ago and who in my view have made outstanding contributions ever since. Mark Stafford Smith possesses a distinctive combination of multi-disciplinary knowledge deeply informed by ecology, such that his writings of the past 25 years are unique. Margaret Friedel has resisted for more than 30 years any temptation to move away from central Australia. In relatively isolated communities scientists (such as Mark and me) may often be pulled hither and yon, whereas connection and trust between science and the community develop only when long-standing residents of scientific achievement, respect and wisdom exist as a bridge. Margaret has played this role superbly.
My reflections focus as much on individuals as on the development of ecology. Science for me is very much a human activity, which is why this account emphasises the people whose contributions I most admire – and incidentally why I look forward with great anticipation to reversing the desert syndrome by becoming resident once more with my colleagues in Alice Springs.
References
Allan, G.E., and Southgate, R.I. 2002. Fire regimes in the spinifex landscapes of Australia. Pp. 145-176 in Bradstock, R.A., Williams J.E., Gill, A.M. (Eds.), Flammable Australia: the Fire Regimes and Biodiversity of a Continent. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Caughley, G., Shepherd, N., and Short, J. (Eds.) 1987. Kangaroos: their ecology and management in the sheep rangelands of Australia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Gregg, P.C., Del Socorro, A.P., and Rochester, W.A. 2001. Field test of migration of moths (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) in inland Australia. Australian Journal of Entomology 40, 249-256.
Haythornthwaite, A.S., and Dickman, C.R. 2006. Distribution, abundance, and individual strategies: a multi-scale analysis of dasyurid marsupials in arid central Australia. Ecography 29, 285-300.
Latz, P.K. 1995. Bushfires & Bushtucker: Aboriginal Plant Use in Central Australia. IAD Press, Alice Springs.
Ludwig, J.A., Wilcox, B.P., Breshears, D.D., Tongway, D.J., and Imeson, A.C. 2005. Vegetation patches and runoff-erosion as interacting ecohydrological processes in semiarid landscapes. Ecology 86, 288-297.
Morton, S. 2008. Deserts. Pp. 5-10 in Lindenmayer, D., Harriss Olson, M., Dovers, S. and Morton, S. (Eds), Ten Commitments: Reshaping the Lucky Country’s Environment. CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.
Morton, S.R., Stafford Smith, D.M., Friedel, M.H., Griffin, G.F. and Pickup, G. 1995. The stewardship of arid Australia: ecology and landscape management. Journal of Environmental Management 43, 195-218.
Newsome, A.E. 1975. An ecological comparison of the two arid-zone kangaroos of Australia, and their anomalous prosperity since the introduction of ruminant stock to their environment. Quarterly review of Biology 50: 389-424.
Newsome, A.E., and Corbett, L.K. 1975. Outbreaks of rodents in semi-arid and arid Australia: causes, preventions, and evolutionary considerations. Pp.117-153 in Prakash, I. and Ghosh. P.K. (Eds.), Rodents in Desert Environments. Junk, The Hague.
Perry, R.A. (Ed.) 1962. General Report on Lands of the Alice Springs Area, Northern Territory, 1956-57. CSIRO, Melbourne.
Robin, L., 2007. How a Continent Created a Nation. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.
Roshier, D.A., Robertson, A.I., Kingsford, R.T., and Green, D.G. 2001. Continental-scale interactions with temporary resources may explain the paradox of large populations of desert waterbirds in Australia. Landscape Ecology 16, 547-556.
Stafford Smith, M., 2008. The ‘desert syndrome’ – causally-linked factors that characterise outback Australia. Rangeland Journal 30: 3-14.
Stafford Smith, M., and Cribb, J. 2009. Dry Times: Blueprint for a Red Land. CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.
Stafford Smith, M., and McAllister, R.R.J. 2008. Managing arid zone natural resources in Australia for spatial and temporal variability – an approach from first principles. Rangeland Journal 30, 15-27.
Wyndham, E. 1983. Movements and breeding season of the budgerigar. Emu 83, 276-282.
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