Environmental Futures Seminar - Dr Frédérik Saltré

Trait diversity, beyond species richness, underpins ecosystem resilience to environmental change. Yet, the extent to which non-native species can functionally replace extinct fauna to mitigate ecosystem collapses, particularly in regions like Australia, remains contentious. We developed a global multidimensional trait-space framework to assess mammalian functional diversity, redundancy, and specialisation across continents, and test whether non-native species could act as ecological analogues for extinct natives. We then expand this framework to a global scale to quantify how spatial patterns in mammal trait space are shaped by environmental and anthropogenic drivers. In this seminar, I will discuss why non-native species are poor substitutes for extinct fauna in regions like Australia, where their introduction may further destabilise already vulnerable ecosystems. I will also display the first spatially explicit global baseline of mammalian trait diversity and show how different sets of traits best explain regional patterns of mammal distribution, and how their dominant environmental drivers vary across geographic contexts.

Dr Frédérik Saltré is a Senior Lecturer in Ecology and Biogeography at the University of Technology Sydney and a Research Scientist at the Australian Museum Research Institute. He leads the Biogeography, Ecology & Modelling (BEAM) Lab | Ngura Nadamari and is Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures. As an ecologist and biogeographer, he has a broad interest in how species respond to environmental change. His research spans marine and terrestrial systems and uses a wide range of mathematical approaches to examine the impacts of climate change and human pressures across spatial and temporal scales.