Wallace Coffee Talks - 29 October 2019

Wallace Coffee Talks - Autumn 2019 

29 October- 1pm - Zoology Museum

Sayali Pawar (Swansea University, UK)

Creating global river obstruction inventories using a citizen science approach.

River obstructions in the form of dams, locks, and other such barriers, are a globally important impact that humans have had on the movement of water, sediment, organisms, and nutrients from land to sea. Despite existing datasets of the world’s largest dams like GRanD, there is not a global inventory of obstructions to rivers. Hence, the goal of this project is to identify and categorise human-built river barriers for rivers wider than ~30 meters across the globe. By using Google Earth Engine and the Global River Widths from Landsat (GRWL) dataset, I am trying to create a global inventory for categorised obstructions on rivers across the globe. 

@PawarSayali20

Konstans Wells (Swansea University, UK)

The devil (survival) is in the detail – scrutinising the evidence for biological extinction risks

Informed management of threatened wildlife species often requires more than just identifying the source of threat. This is because the adverse effects of environmental stressors on wildlife performance may unfold differently over time and space or affect individuals to different extents. But how can we establish the evidence of which particular biological processes drive wildlife extinction risk and how can we use such insights for more targeted conservation efforts and better forecasting? 

This short talk invites discussion over a cuppa about the use of individual-based models and model evaluation techniques for exploring extinction dynamics if ‘landscapes of danger’ are heterogeneous or if individuals are prone to different treats, using Tasmanian devils and their Tasmanian devil facial tumour disease burden as a case study.

@KonsWells