Ivor Beatty Award for 2019

The Ivor Beatty Award is presented annually to the best paper published in Pacific Conservation Biology during a calendar year. The award honours the contributions of the late Ivor Beatty, AM, to conservation in the Pacific region. Ivor’s family business Surrey Beatty and Sons published numerous books on natural history and conservation between 1981 and early this century, many of which have had a significant scientific impact. He founded Pacific Conservation Biology in 1992. Surrey Beatty and Sons continued the journal until the end of 2014, with the family maintaining Ivor’s legacy and vision after his passing in 2012. However, recognising the difficulty of meeting the increasing services expected by authors in recent times, they transferred the journal to CSIRO Publishing from 2015. The Ivor Beatty Award recognises and celebrates this legacy.

The 2019 Ivor Beatty Award is presented to:

Sophie L. Cross, Sean Tomlinson, Michael D. Craig, Kingsley W. Dixon and Philip W. Bateman, 2019. Overlooked and undervalued: the neglected role of fauna and a global bias in ecological restoration assessments (Pacific Conservation Biology 25, 331–341, doi: 10.1071/PC18079).

This research formed the basis for a PhD thesis assessing how animals respond to habitat restoration following the discontinuation of mining activities. Collaborating with the ARC Centre for Mine Site Restoration at Curtin University, this research aimed to highlight the need for an increased focus on fauna monitoring and behavioural studies as a way of understanding the long-term success of mine site restoration. The research identified a considerable lack of research assessing the responses of animals to habitat restoration following the discontinuation of mining activities. The research strongly suggests that monitoring the behavioural and ecological responses of animals to habitat change and restoration is critical to the long-term success of restoration measures in effectively reinstating healthy and functional ecosystems.

Dr Sophie Cross is a behavioural and restoration ecologist. She has a passion for all things reptilian and researches how mining activities and habitat restoration impact animal communities. Her research interests include conservation biology, restoration and behavioural ecology, and herpetology. Sophie currently works as a research associate at Curtin University, in the ARC Centre for Mine Site Restoration and Curtin University Behavioural Ecology Lab.

Dr Sean Tomlinson is a conservation physiologist who seeks to provide mechanistic bases to the management and restoration of biodiversity across a broad range of taxa. His research seeks to quantify the performance of physiological traits, from metabolic rates in insects, reptiles and mammals to germination rates in seeds, and use these to characterise the interaction of the organism with its environment. His work often extends to predicting where in a landscape organisms are likely to persist, and understanding the constraints that limit them to these locations to guide the management and restoration of these target species.

Dr Mike Craig is a conservation biologist focusing on applied issues to understand threats to vertebrate populations, and management practices that can ameliorate those threats. He has a keen interest in understanding how to improve restoration practices to better accommodate fauna and the role they play in restored ecosystems. His broader research interests include studying a wide range of human impacts on vertebrate populations, including logging, Phytophthora dieback, climate change and fire, and how management practices can conserve threatened populations.

Professor Kingsley Dixon is a conservation biologist and restoration ecologist known for his research into mine site restoration and conservation of threatened species.

Associate Professor Bill Bateman works as a behavioural ecologist at Curtin University, working on invertebrates through to large mammals with a special affection for insects (especially crickets) and lizards.

The Ivor Beatty Award is judged by the Editor-in-Chief Dr Mike Calver, and the Managing Editors Dr Alan Lymbery and Dr Mike van Keulen. On awarding the Cross et al. paper, Editor-in-Chief Mike Calver commented ‘Ecological restoration of abandoned mine sites is an important global issue, providing habitat for a wide range of threatened species. Much of the focus, though, is on the plant species, which assumes that if the plants are right the animals will follow. This neglects the role of animals in many critical ecological processes such as pollination or biopedturbation (the changes to soil structure from animal diggings). Not only does this valuable review address the important questions of mine site restoration in general and the role of animals in particular, but it includes a careful consideration of both the journal literature and the grey literature to uncover critical information.’

In recognition of the award, the authors will receive a $500 book voucher from the publisher, a certificate and will each receive a subscription to Pacific Conservation Biology. The staff at CSIRO Publishing and the editorial board join the Managing Editors and the Editor-in-Chief in congratulating the authors on their achievement.