BRS: Corey Bradshaw "Modelling the Late Pleistocene human expansion and the first wave of Anthropocene extinctions"

The seminar will be hosted by the Parrott Lab.

Cookies will be served at 11:30am in the Beaty Biodiversity Centre atrium (cookie providers: Steph B. and Mackenzie K.).

Seminar will begin at 12:00pm in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum auditorium. 

Modelling the Late Pleistocene human expansion and the first wave of Anthropocene extinctions
Homo sapiens spread rapidly out of Africa ~70-60 thousand years ago (ka), reaching Australia by about 60 ka, Europe by about 40 ka, and eventually North and South America by 14-12 ka. With this invasion wave of new humans also came extraordinary extinctions of mostly large-bodied species, including other Homo species. However, contemporaneous and large shifts in climatic conditions during many of these invasion waves make interpreting the already scant palaeontological and archaeological evidence we use to construct past ecosystem transitions even more challenging. I will describe new ways we are using the indirect evidence to construct not only the likely pathways and concentrations of the first humans to enter new continents, but also the community-level implications of their arrival, all the while taking variation in primary productivity and climate change into account. By combining various analytical tools of modern ecology such as least-cost path biogeography, age-structured population models, and ecological network analysis, Late Quaternary palaeo-ecology is maturing into a multidisciplinary field of advanced analytical detail. By quantifying our species’ tumultuous past, our desire is to ground predictions of our planet’s future pathways with reliable, longer-term palaeo baselines.

Professor Corey J. A. Bradshaw

Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology

College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University

bio: www.flinders.edu.au/people/corey.bradshaw

publications: scholar.google.com/citations?user=1sO0O3wAAAAJ&hl=en

blog: ConservationBytes.com

Corey Bradshaw is the Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology at Flinders University where he heads the Flinders Modelling Node of the Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. Previously, he was the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Level 3 Future Fellow, with former positions at the South Australian Research and Development Institute, Charles Darwin University, and the University of Tasmania. Corey has completed three tertiary degrees in ecology (BSc, MSc, PhD) from universities in Canada and New Zealand, and a Certificate in Veterinary Conservation Medicine from Murdoch University.

Corey’s raison d’être is to demonstrate to human society that we can no longer ignore the impacts of deforestation, pollution, disease, habitat loss, extinctions, over-grazing, over-fishing or warming climates on human wealth, health and wellbeing. Scientists must not only present the empirical evidence underlying these relationships, they should also excel in telling their stories and advocating for positive change. In a world where human activity has precipitated the current Anthropocene extinction event, Corey’s aim is to provide irrefutable evidence to influence government policy and private behaviour for the preservation of our planet’s biowealth.

Corey has published over 270 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 11 book chapters and 3 books, including The Effective Scientist (Cambridge University Press) and Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie (Chicago University Press). He is highly cited, with nearly 17000 citations to date, an h-index of 64, and a m-index 3.4. He is a member of the Faculty of 1000 and Fellow of the Royal Society of South Australia. He was awarded the 2017 Verco Medal from the Royal Society of South Australia, a 2017 Rockefeller Foundation ‘Bellagio’ Writer’s Fellowship, the 2012 Mid-Career Research Excellence Award from the Faculty of Sciences at The University of Adelaide, the 2010 Australian Ecology Research Award, the 2010 Scopus Young Researcher of the Year, the 2009 HG Andrewartha Medal, and a 2008 Young Tall Poppy Science Award. He is regularly featured in Australian and international media for his research. His blog, ConservationBytes.com, has been visited over 2 million times.